The War for Where You Start
Holiday 2025 revealed the real battle. It's not about shopping. It's about who owns the first question.
“He who holds the high ground holds the war.” — Sun Tzu
Over Thanksgiving, whenever I saw someone looking something up, I asked. ChatGPT or Google?
Google. Every time.
Our families have shared Thanksgiving since 1971. Two IP lawyers at the table. Alan, my father-in-law, was explaining how Harvey AI was rolling out at his firm. Harry, just retired from the patent office, shook his head. “It hallucinates.”
I told them to start every new information journey at ChatGPT. Just try it. See what happens. Harry looked at me like I was selling something.
“Remember when I said you’d call a person, not a place? You didn’t believe that either. This is bigger.”
Then Monday happened.
On Monday, Sam Altman declared code red.
OpenAI is delaying AI agents for shopping and health. It’s pushing back advertising. Pausing a personal assistant called Pulse. The most valuable AI company on earth just froze its commerce roadmap to focus on one thing: making ChatGPT faster, more reliable, more personal.
That same day, the Cyber Monday numbers landed. $14.25 billion online. $44 billion for the week. The first trillion-dollar holiday in U.S. history, locked.
But the number that matters most isn’t the revenue. It’s 670%.
That’s how much AI-driven traffic to retail sites jumped on Cyber Monday. Not 67. Six hundred and seventy. Shoppers coming through AI assistants converted at materially higher rates. They weren’t browsing. They were acting on recommendations.
Altman saw those numbers. Then he looked at Google.
Gemini jumped from 450 million to 650 million users in three months. It beat ChatGPT on key benchmarks and sent Google’s stock climbing. OpenAI isn’t profitable. It raises constantly just to keep going. Google funds AI out of operating cash. The math is existential.
But benchmarks weren’t the trigger. Behavior was. Holiday 2025 proved that consumers are already shopping through AI, not polished commerce agents, not full product flows, just chatbots. People are typing gift questions into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, then following wherever the answer leads.
The behavior arrived before the business model.
This is a real-estate war, not a feature war. For 25 years, Google owned the most valuable property on the internet: where you start. The search bar. The default input box. Every transaction flowed downstream from that beginning.
ChatGPT is trying to take that ground. If it becomes where people ask their first question, everything downstream, shopping, health, travel, finance, routes through it automatically. Agents can wait. The starting point can’t.
Whoever owns the beginning owns the end.
The implications are unforgiving. You are operating on land two trillion-dollar companies are fighting over. The terrain shifts daily. The rules don’t exist yet. And 203 million Americans just spent Thanksgiving weekend training every model on what desire looks like. Every question. Every click. Every purchase. The machines absorbed all of it, and they won’t forget.
Clarity is no longer strategy. It’s survival.
If an AI can’t explain you in one sentence, you don’t exist in that moment. Not buried. Gone. The algorithm doesn’t reward nuance. It rewards relevance. And relevance means fitting into a conversation you don’t control, inside an interface you didn’t design.
Fuzzy brands will get erased.
“Premium quality at accessible prices” is invisible to a language model.
“The only organic gummy vitamin that tastes like candy” is not.
The brands that win will be the ones the machine can summarize, recommend, and defend.
The war isn’t coming. It started. Google has distribution. OpenAI has momentum. Anthropic is flanking from the enterprise side. And consumers have already picked a side without noticing. They’ve begun asking before they begin searching.
They’re not searching anymore. They’re asking.
Be worth the answer.