Fashion & Beauty Need To Be Ready For The Internet’s New Front Door

For as long as most of the current crop of fashion and beauty professionals remember, the digital landscape has been dominated by Google and Meta. These companies’ platforms have dictated the consumer journey – from discovery to purchase – through search algorithms, social media feeds, a 20-year monopoly on internet video, and attention-based, granular advertising ecosystems.

For all intents and purposes, these platforms have become the internet. For fashion and beauty, Discovery occurred through visually driven social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok; information retrieval was centralised in Google’s hegemonic search ecosystem; and transactions were brokered through established marketplaces such as Amazon or proprietary brand platforms. It was a loop. Messy, sometimes maddening, but mostly predictable. Brands learned to optimise for it, allocating budgetary and creative resources to meet the distinct affordances and algorithmic biases of each channel.

But new developments suggest a seismic shift could be underway, with OpenAI making some important moves that seem to speak to a desire not just to play around on the periphery of search, but to create a new, closed-loop model for the internet where engaging, browsing, and buying all exist within a single unified generative AI application.

To put it another way: the loop at the centre of advertising and selling things online is fraying. Or more accurately, it’s being rebuilt – faster than most brands are prepared for, and with AI (under the auspices of a single company, OpenAI) standing at its centre.

As buzzy as the consumer-facing ChatGPT app remains, a lot of OpenAI’s end users are developers tapping into its APIs to add generative text, speech, and, as of this week, native image capabilities to their applications and services. But OpenAI is clearly not content to just become a backend infrastructure provider – and new rumours indicate that the company is working to capitalise on its consumer audience to build, well, an AI-native modality for commerce and consumption that’s more vertically integrated and better able to capture the different stages of the consumer journey.

ChatGPT is already capable of facilitating product recommendations and transactions in a signal thread. And beyond the assistant itself, backend signals are beginning to reveal the company’s broader commercial ambitions. Code strings found this week in ChatGPT’s web bundle – “buy now,” “shopify_checkout_url” – point to the imminent integration of native shopping capabilities, potentially through a direct partnership with Shopify. If realised, this would transform ChatGPT into not just a search and respond tool that can make product recommendations, but a commerce interface – a place where users move from query to purchase without ever leaving the conversation, and in a way that doesn’t rely on users trusting an AI model to run a cloud instance of a web browser to shop on their behalf.

From the moment a consumer asks, “What shade works best for my skin tone?” to the moment they click ‘Buy Now’, that journey could exist within ChatGPT, and be shaped by the weighting that the models behind it place on different products, brands, and experiences. No search, no tabs, no feeds. Just a conversation that listens, advises, and converts.

This is a profound break from the architecture we’ve grown used to. For decades, the internet’s core design rewarded fragmentation. Discovery happened on one platform, validation through reviews on another, and transactions somewhere else entirely. It created an entire industry of optimisation, referrals, and affiliations between different channels – SEO, paid ads, affiliate marketing, influencer deals – to stitch together the mess. What OpenAI is proposing (and rapidly building) is a tightly integrated loop where AI becomes the guide, the platform, and the shopfront.

The implications stretch far beyond convenience, which is how the benefits will be billed for brands and consumers. They strike at the heart of platform power. Google and Meta – two of the most powerful gatekeepers in this fragmented world – are now under scrutiny from regulators. U.S. antitrust actions are gathering real momentum. Google faces potential break up scenarios, including the forced divesture of Chrome. Meta’s data practices and vertical integrations are also under fire. Into this power vacuum steps OpenAI – not with a traditional social network or search engine, but with growing ambitions that could ultimately challenge both.

Reports suggest OpenAI has also expressed interest in acquiring Google’s Chrome browser should a divesture be required, a potential move that would give the company a powerful foothold at the gateway of the web. (Other AI companies have also made similar pitches to acquire Chrome this week.) At the same time, insiders point to OpenAI exploring its own social media platform, one that could integrate conversational AI as its core interface. While neither initiative is officially confirmed, the direction of travel is clear: OpenAI isn’t just building tools, it’s building a new operating system for the internet itself.

The fashion and beauty industries should be paying close attention. These sectors don’t just follow consumer behaviour, they anticipate it. And right now, behaviour is starting to change. A growing number of shoppers, particularly Gen Z, are bypassing traditional search altogether, using AI and social media as their starring points. They want fast, contextual answers, not pages filled with results. They want recommendations that sound like they are coming from a friend, not a feed.

In this world, the funnel as we know it collapses. What remains  is a new kind of loop: fast, frictionless, and conversational. And if OpenAI owns that loop, then brands must rethink how and where they show up. It’s not about being present in the feed anymore. It’s about being the answer.

Of course, this raises uncomfortable questions. Who owns the customer relationship? Who governs how brands and products show up when the mechanics of large language models are still difficult to interpret? For the past decade, brands have invested heavily in direct-to-consumer models, CRM systems, loyalty apps – all in the name of control. But a new middle layer, one powered by generative AI, could render much of that moot. If customers never visit your site, never open your emails, never enter your ecosystem, do you still have a relationship with them? Or does OpenAI?

None of this happens in isolation. The regulatory landscape is shifting, the competitive terrain is changing and the technologies underpinning the internet are evolving faster than most brands can strategise. But that’s exactly why this moment matters. OpenAI isn’t just adding new layers to the digital ecosystem. It might be replacing the entire foundation.

OpenAI may never launch a traditional social network or search engine. But if it controls the interfaces through which consumers ask, decide and buy, it won’t need to.

The task ahead is not adapting to a new platform. It’s preparing for a new protocol, one where the internet listens, speaks back, and closes the sale before the browser even opens.