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Why people are turning to ChatGPT for ‘vendor bake-offs’

Vendor selection can be a slog. A couple planning a wedding might spend hours browsing photographers’ websites, reading Yelp reviews, and creating spreadsheets to compare prices and packages. In the business world, the same ritual plays out with higher stakes: marketing leaders sit through demos, pore over whitepapers, and lean on procurement teams to run side-by-side comparisons of software or services. Whether for a wedding or an analytics contract, the process can be slow, high risk, and uncertain. It’s often shaped more by who has the sexiest case studies than by who is truly the best fit.

But many buyers are now outsourcing the vendor bake-off to ChatGPT, reports. With a single prompt—”Compare Brex to Mercury for a small startup” or “List the top Indian wedding caterers in San Mateo by price and reviews”—they get a structured, personalized comparison in seconds. This isn’t fringe behavior. Forrester estimates that already use generative AI tools like ChatGPT during their purchasing process. In a short, natural conversation a buyer can digest everything valuable the Internet has to offer to help you make the decision, without ever having to open a second tab on their browser.

ChatGPT isn’t just changing how people choose vendors; it’s also changing how they justify their choices. Bosses, procurement teams, and discerning mothers-in-law want to know: why this vendor and not the others? Employees are expected to show they compared multiple options, considered cost and risk, and landed on the best overall fit. Procurement teams in particular look for side-by-side comparisons of features, pricing, and value before signing off. That’s why ChatGPT has become such a useful shortcut: instead of building a spreadsheet or spending time digesting analyst reports, employees can generate a ready-made comparison that doubles as evidence. It doesn’t just make the work faster, it also makes it more persuasive: ChatGPT becomes a source of outside validation that makes their case feel more objective.

For buyers, the upside is clear: ChatGPT speeds up vendor selection, structures the decision-making process, and even arms them with an instantaneous rationale to take back to their boss. G2’s 2024 Buyer Behavior Report found that “AI Power-Users” spend , a clear sign that AI is compressing the lengthiest, most labor-intensive parts of the buying cycle. As new tools like ChatGPT Agent can browse vendor websites, compare features and pricing, fill out RFQs, and generate structured reports, the bake-off can now be performed almost entirely autonomously.

But the bigger shift is on the vendor side. In the old world, the vendor bake-off played out across a brand’s website, its competitors’ sites, review sites and analyst reports, and buyers’ internal spreadsheets. Brands could try to shape this process with case studies, demo scripts, and a conversion-optimized website. In the new world of AI search, the bake-off happens inside ChatGPT. If the AI doesn’t understand your value proposition clearly, if it’s drawing on outdated or competitor-skewed sources, or if it’s blocked from crawling key areas of your website, you may not even make it into the comparison table.

Smart marketers should stop thinking of ChatGPT as just another distribution channel and instead see it as the arbiter of the bake-off. A marketer’s job is no longer just to put their message in front of potential buyers, but to ensure AI systems can explain what their product does, who it’s for, and why it matters. If ChatGPT can’t articulate a vendor’s value proposition clearly, they’re effectively invisible at the exact moment they’re being stacked against competitors. And the stakes are high: Data from Scrunch AI shows that visitors referred from AI search platforms are three to five times more likely to convert than those from traditional organic search, reflecting the far higher intent of these visitors. Buyers are outsourcing the browsing and research to AI but still want to be involved in the final purchase decision. Increasingly, they’re making up their minds in conversation with AI before they ever land on a website—and when they do, the only action left may be completing the transaction.

Even PR looks different through this lens. A mention in the Wall Street Journal might impress human readers, but if WSJ blocks AI crawlers, it won’t help when ChatGPT assembles a vendor comparison. A tier-two trade publication that’s accessible to bots could end up doing more to educate ChatGPT about a product than a big-name feature ever will. In other words, brands are no longer doing PR just for people—they’re doing PR for the AI.

And even when vendors have done everything right and win the comparison, they can’t drop the ball on the handoff. If a buyer comes to a vendor’s site already persuaded by ChatGPT’s side-by-side comparison, they’re not looking to be nurtured, they’re ready to act. Vendors who don’t make it easy to convert risk losing the bake-off even after being chosen.

In this new landscape, the metrics that marketers care about shift accordingly. Instead of measuring web traffic, vendors need to monitor whether they’re showing up in side-by-side AI comparisons, how often they’re cited relative to competitors, the sentiment attached to those mentions, and conversion from AI-referred traffic.

AI is collapsing the vendor bake-off itself into a single conversation. For vendors, the mandate is clear—teach AI systems who they are, track how they’re being compared, and smooth the path for buyers arriving pre-sold. Otherwise, they may never even make it onto the short list.

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