With billions of listings on eBay.com, the marketplace is no stranger to the complexities of matching unique products to consumer search queries.
And with more than a quarter of eBay’s traffic stemming from organic search (according to web analysis firm SimilarWeb) the merchant has to continually ensure that search engines can easily crawl its listings. And in 2025, that also means being crawled by AI search platforms, like ChatGPT, said Xiaodi Zhang, Vice President of Seller Experience.
“We have always invested quite a bit on making sure that our listings are optimized for search engines,” Zhang said. “We have dedicated teams focusing on that and making sure that basically our listings are set up and marked up in a structured way to make it super easy for different search engines to index our listings.”
EBay said it’s working so the large language models can appropriately index and crawl the pages and access the metadata.
The marketplace said that over half the traffic it receives from organic search, land on a listing page, which is a double digit increase from a year ago. Similarly, when Google’s AI overviews mentions eBay, about half the time Google is citing a product listing page.
It’s advantageous for consumers to land on a listing page opposed to eBay’s homepage, a search results page or another “upper funnel” page, because then those shoppers are further into the shopping journey.
“The benefit of targeting view item pages is that the purchase intent is stronger and conversion is more likely,” eBay said in an email.
ChatGPT sends traffic to eBay
In August, 29% of eBay.com’s global traffic was from organic search, according to SimilarWeb. What’s more, the top referring website to eBay.com was ChatGPT.com in August. About 3.5% of eBay’s traffic in August came from a referring website, and within this, 13.4% (the leader) of those clicks were from ChatGPT.
To compare with other large mass merchants that operate marketplaces, about 5% of Amazon’s traffic was from referrals. And within this bucket, 4% of traffic stemmed from ChatGPT, the fourth highest. At Walmart, of the 3.4% of the traffic it receives from referrals, like eBay, ChatGPT was the top referral, generating 20.9% of traffic.
Some retailers are worried about “zero click searches,” which is when shoppers do not click through to websites because the AI search platform answered their question. EBay, however, is not.
“With AI, people are looking for specific things and we have all the unique items,” she said. “So if anything, we’re in a great position to help our sellers just given the breadth of inventory that we do.”