Until recently, the best way to sort through all this complexity was to consult financial product review sites like NerdWallet or The Points Guy. These sites offer pro/con tables, calculators, and side-by-side comparisons—tools designed to make a highly complicated process somewhat less complicated. But they didn’t make it easy.
Now, consumers are turning to AI chatbots, Scrunch reports. Spend two minutes consulting with ChatGPT and you walk away with a definitive recommendation. It’s an experience that traditional review sites are having a hard time competing with. NerdWallet, for example, reported its credit card revenue fell 24% year-over-year in Q1 2025, citing “ongoing organic search headwinds” as the cause.
These traffic drops are part of a broader decline across online publishing as a whole, driven by AI-powered search features. After Google rolled out AI overviews in mid-2024, Forbes and HuffPo each lost around 40%, and CNN fell almost 30%. The decreases in traffic are hitting review sites particularly hard because of their affiliate business model. Review sites profit by serving as a middleman, helping consumers sift through information overload and then earning a commission from the brand when someone clicks through to buy. Ask Google what the best toaster is, and you’ll get a bunch of links providing some combination of lists, reviews, and rankings meant to funnel you to a purchase. Ask ChatGPT the same question and you just get … an answer. You jump straight to the brand’s checkout page, bypassing the review site entirely. The middleman step—where review sites made their money—disappears.
What does this mean for the future of review sites? They’re likely to continue to see traffic and revenue going down. Smaller ones may fold, while bigger players scramble to adapt to the new AI landscape, pivoting into licensing deals like news publishers are starting to do, or leaning into Reddit-style user generated content for enhanced credibility.
For consumers, though, the decline of online review sites comes with big benefits—as well as some uncertainty. Shoppers already know that most online reviews are bought and paid for. That’s what drives them to seek out more authentic reviews from peers, in places like product review sections or on sites like Reddit. But as brands increasingly infiltrate these channels, trustworthy online reviews have become vanishingly rare. On ChatGPT, instead of wondering whether a “review” is just an affiliate link in disguise, consumers get a recommendation that feels more trustworthy—even if it raises new questions about what sources the AI is drawing from.
For brands, this shift will create some big winners—and many losers. On a traditional review site, even if you weren’t the top recommendation, you might still have landed somewhere in a top ten list, with plenty of opportunities for clicks. In ChatGPT, there’s usually a single clear winner, with one or two alternates. If your product makes the shortlist, you stand to capture a much larger share of attention and sales. If it doesn’t, you effectively vanish from the consumer’s decision journey.
That makes visibility inside AI platforms the new marketing battleground. In the Google era, marketers optimized for keywords and backlinks to try and make it into the top search results. In the AI era, the mechanics are far less transparent. Many marketers are treating AI optimization like SEO with a new coat of paint—as if it’s just another checklist of on-page improvements. But that thinking misses the big picture. The entire pre-sale digital marketing journey is changing, not just the front door. Consumers may never visit a brand’s website at all. They’ll go directly from an AI answer to checkout.
The old model focused on maximizing distribution and converting traffic referred to a brand’s website. The new model is about education—making sure AI systems understand a brand and can recommend it credibly. That requires a shift in mindset: less about luring eyeballs, more about training and informing the AI agents that stand between a brand and its customers.
Review sites made their money by inserting themselves into consumers’ browsing behavior. But browsing itself is what AI has eliminated. If the future of search is about skipping the middleman and going straight to the answer, then the very function review sites were built to serve is quietly disappearing. By offering a faster, simpler, and more trusted path from question to purchase, ChatGPT makes the old model feel obsolete. For consumers, that shift makes things easier. For brands, it looks like a new kind of competition, where visibility depends on what AI systems know and recommend—not what page shows up in a Google ranking.
This story was produced by Scrunch and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.