For fashion brands, showing up in AI search is quickly becoming table stakes. The harder question is what shoppers find when they get there.
At Aviator Nation, AI-attributed sales are still in the early stages. Over the last 30 days, the California lifestyle brand saw around 20 orders come through ChatGPT, according to Curtis Ulrich, the company’s director of e-commerce. Compared to the company’s total order volume, that figure is “fairly insignificant,” he said. Still, the brand is already preparing for a future in which AI becomes a more meaningful shopping interface.
“We still want to be mindful of it, and we want to prepare for a future where that’s a dominant form of shopping for us as a clothing brand,” Ulrich said.
As most brands have over the last few months, Aviator Nation has been enriching its product catalog with more detailed metafields, product information and imagery. But Ulrich said the bigger challenge is making sure AI tools understand the brand in the first place.
When Aviator Nation looked at how it was showing up in large language models, the results were not entirely aligned with how the company sees itself. Much of the public information AI tools were picking up centered on its partnerships, including its Major League Baseball and music festival collaborations. Those are important to the brand, but Ulrich said they represent only one part of its identity.
“What we uncovered was that it wasn’t telling the brand’s story exactly as we felt it in our hearts and minds,” he said. “From that, we could see there’s a lot of work to be done in PR and storytelling, and making sure that we’re not getting pigeonholed.”
For its part, Shopify has been working to increasingly facilitate AI-led shopping and agentic commerce. Shopify’s help center states that its merchants’ products can now be discovered through AI channels including ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta. Shopify has said AI-referred traffic to stores on its platform grew more than eight times year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026, while AI-referred orders carried 14% higher average order values than organic search.
For Shopify, the goal is to make its Shop app a higher-intent discovery channel. Jess Jacobs, Shop’s head of growth, said the company is trying to avoid turning shoppers’ individual searches into another “retargeting echo chamber.” It’s instead using shoppers’ history to surface a broader mix of brands.
“When purchases happen within the Shop app, it’s almost 50% of the time that a user is buying from a brand for the first time,” Jacobs said.
Beyond newer AI integrations, Shop is also becoming a content channel. Jacobs said brands including Tibi are distributing vertical video through Shop, while Pucci has updated its Shop store as luxury brands put more emphasis on how they appear inside the app.
Aviator Nation, for one, is seeing traction on the platform. Shop currently accounts for 3-5% of the brand’s total revenue, but Ulrich said it is the company’s fastest-growing channel, up around 30% year to date. Shop Posts have become part of every product drop, with the brand tracking impressions, clicks and revenue. Some posts have generated hundreds of thousands of impressions and thousands of clicks.
For Aviator Nation, Shop Posts have become a useful complement to paid social rather than a replacement for it. The appeal is simple: The brand can put content in front of shoppers who are already in a commerce environment, without paying Meta for every impression.
“You’re not going to shift money away from Meta,” Ulrich said. “But there are other ways to get in front of people and other digital touchpoints you can have outside of just continuing to hammer paid ads.”
Beauty brands are also leaning in. At Fenty Beauty, Shop posts are still in a “test and learn” phase, said Nanette Wong, vp of global brand marketing. The brand is seeing tens to hundreds of thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks, while also using the channel to better understand how shoppers enter the brand.
For Fenty, the clearest AI use case is reducing friction in high-choice categories, Wong said. She pointed to foundation shades and lip pairings, where shoppers often need more guidance before buying.
“What I’m most excited about with all of this AI is how we can make the shopping experience easier for the consumer,” Wong said.
Still, neither brand sees AI as replacing the emotional or human side of discovery. Wong said shoppers may use AI to narrow down choices, but still look to creators, UGC, friends or other channels for verification. Ulrich said Aviator Nation still wants discovery to happen through stores, festivals, music venues and other real-world experiences.
He pointed to one recent ChatGPT-attributed sale for a hat tied to Aviator Nation’s Summer Sessions, its music series in Malibu. He hypothesized that the shopper had encountered the brand through the IRL event, then used ChatGPT to find the product later.
“That to me is what I would love the future of these agentic commerce tools to look like,” Ulrich said. “Someone might first connect with us through a real-life experience, then use our site, social or ChatGPT to find the product afterward. All of those touchpoints can work together to bring them back to the brand and ultimately drive conversion.”
“We’re selling $200 hoodies,” he said. “There needs to be some emotional connection as to why you will convert and buy this hoodie.”
