The Signal Economy Begins: What OpenAI’s Checkout Means for B2B.

This is huge, the first conversion protocol for the LLM era. It transcends e-commerce; tokenising intent, rebuilding attribution, and learning how to sell trust in the signals era

OpenAI just added shopping to ChatGPT.

You’ve probably seen the headlines “you can now buy on Etsy directly inside ChatGPT.” Both Etsy and Shopify will have buyable links presented in GPT in time for Christmas

It sounds like a classic consumer story.

It’s not. It’s actually a lot bigger then that in my opinion

This isn’t about checkout.

It’s about conversion.

If you’re in B2B you maybe glazed over the headlines but today we’ll explore how this could have enormous ramifications for tokenised intent within LLMs, throwing out new and powerful buying signals from the black box of zero click worlds. It got me quite excited!

The OpenAI commerce layer is not just a transactional convenience, it’s the first visible conversion protocol for the LLM era.

It merges search, discovery, and purchase inside the same interface — compressing the journey into a single moment of verified intent.

It tokenises behaviour.

It turns signals into currency.

And it has profound implications for B2B.

The Death of the Funnel, the Birth of the Protocol

For twenty years, marketing has built itself around funnel mechanics: attract, engage, capture, convert. TOFU, MOFU and BOFU. Acronyms and theory that never quite mapped in reality and were too simplistic at their core for the complexities of B2B

Each stage designed to measure quantifiable actions like clicks, views, form fills, demo requests.

But attribution on the open web is floundering. Cookies are gone, GA4 is broken, and buyers now operate in an invisible, fragmented world where most activity never hits your analytics.

The LLM layer changes attribution for these reasons. I’ve heard mutterings of websites transforming into single page “original web” sites with a whole catalogue of machine indexable, structured content parked behind them but also large or even fully outside of the human eye. The back of house structured content sells the llm and the sexy front page sells the human.

This is all because of the seismic changes enacted by LLMs and how 1.8 billion people now engage with them.

These LLM’s don’t just observe behaviour, they now host it.

It knows what was asked, what was chosen, and what converted. It knows the history of chat too; it’s literally seen and chatted through growing intent with its human companions. It’s not a big stretch to think this tech will soon, if not today, know what you’re buying before you do

The conversation is the conversion. This layer hosts the intent data unlock of the century

That’s why this isn’t about a better checkout — it’s about a new kind of signal infrastructure.

When OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity start managing verified micro-transactions, they’re not just processing payments.

They’re building a closed-loop attribution engine - one that tokenises action and turns it into structured, portable intent data.

All in a llm walled garden. That’s the conversion protocol.

And B2B needs to see it for what it is.

This is one area that I don’t think B2B can afford to be 5 years behind on

What This Means for B2B: From Gated Assets to Paid Signals

For decades, B2B has relied on free gated content to generate leads.

A PDF for an email address.

A “get the guide” CTA.

We’ve all done it.

But here’s the psychological trap:

People rarely value what they get for free.

There’s a wealth of behavioural research from Kahneman to Cialdini showing that commitment changes cognition. I remember hearing it years ago with regard to gym memberships. Give a non-gym-going person a free pass to a top end gym and they don’t value and don’t go. Make them pay £5 for what should cost £50 and they’re banging down the door because of the perceived value. Human psychology is weird but is B2B missing a trick? Would a nominal paid asset even at giveaway prices lift harder anyway and if you buried that in the LLM, would you start to unlock a hidden intent super-layer?

When someone pays even a tiny amount they shift from “browser” to “buyer.”

It’s intent in its purest form.

That’s exactly why I run a paid tier for Unmatched.

It’s not to make an extra seven bucks a month.

It’s a statement of intent.

My paid readers aren’t buying access — they’re signalling belief. They’re saying, “I value this, I intend to use it, or I want to work with you.” They’re more likely to take action and engage deeper, which is my purpose

That micro-transaction creates a new kind of connection — a token of trust.

B2B can do the same.

Imagine offering your compliance checklist, your benchmark report, your dataset — not behind a form fill, but as a $0 or $1 micro-purchase inside ChatGPT.

The LLM captures the verified identity.

You capture the signal and the transactional email and a person more primed to take action

And suddenly, your “content” becomes a transactional asset — visible to the LLM layer, trackable, rankable, and valuable.

Is it a big stretch to think the llm would surface more of your content if it’s seeing its users open the wallet to get more from you?

Free becomes frictionless, but frictionless becomes valueless. On the gym pass analogy would you be more likely to read the exclusive high value white paper which was sold at $5/15/25 then the free one?

The new strategy is tokenised value — where each interaction carries weight and intent.

Conversion as a Flow, Not a Moment

Think about your own funnel.

What if every whitepaper, every report, every interactive tool became part of a conversion stream, not a static page?

Each asset can sit inside the LLM layer as a claimable micro-offer:

• A free checklist (tokenised at $0)

• A benchmark calculator ($1)

• A report with consulting access ($9)

Each one generating verified, structured data — not anonymous traffic.

In this model, your CRM becomes a ledger of intent.

Each interaction is weighted, portable, and alive.

This is how attribution gets rebuilt in the signal era — not by chasing cookies, but by designing micro-conversions that the LLM can understand, store, and learn from.

Below we’ll put the theory into practice and here comes that paid tier I mentioned above - you can read below and all my archives, access my tools and my content on a 7 day free trial