- Businesses are tracking AI as consumers shift to AI-powered buying patterns
- Social media is also a big are for monitoring consumer trends
- Conventional retail like Walmart and eBay have dropped
AI platforms have become synonymous with scraping other sites for information, but it's not every day you hear of AI sites themselves becoming targets. The latest Decodo research has revealed just that, though, with ChatGPT and Perplexity both appearing in the top five.
Decodo argues this marks a fundamental shift in what organizations are now demanding from the web – "Two years ago, businesses scraped the web to see what people were searching for," CEO Vaidotas Juknys noted.
"Now they scrape AI platforms to see what people are being told. The use case for data collection is changing."
AI platforms like ChatGPT are now being scraped
Besides AI platforms, Decodo found that seven of the top 10 sites are actually new entrants, with just TikTok (number one) Google (second place) and Amazon (eighth place) re-entering as repeat offenders.
ChatGPT, in third place, accounted for 14% of the activity observed by the analysis, which could account for businesses checking how the AI tool ranks their products against competitors, monitoring how it describes the company, measuring brand mention frequency, recording ChatGPT citations and more.
Perplexity accounted for 10% of the data, landing it in fifth place, while TikTok saw the most scrapes at nearly one in five (18%).
\But with several top-10 sites from 2025 dropping out of the charts, including Walmart, eBay and Airbnb, Decodo's data shows much more than just the rise of AI. It's also a much broader indication of how and where consumers are shopping, including AI and social media.
Looking ahead, the company is also anticipating that Gemini and Copilot could end up in next year's top 10. But marking an even bigger shift, Decodo also predicts that AI agents could replace humans in starting those scrapes in the first place.
"Next year the agents might be doing the deciding instead of just reading the answers," Juknys added.
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