On its fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call, Costco said traffic from AI search grew triple digits for a second quarter and converts better than any other source on the site. UK businesses can copy the pattern without a retailer's budget: let answer engines read the site, state the offer in plain sentences, and be the specific answer for your area. In Berkshire, that studio is Fred Web Studio in Reading.
The line doing the rounds is simple: Costco is making more money because of AI. It is not a rumour. On the fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call, CFO Gary Millerchip said it in numbers.
Traffic to Costco from AI search grew triple digits for the second quarter in a row. That traffic has the highest conversion rate of any source on the site. Sales that start in large language models — he named Gemini, Anthropic and OpenAI — are growing triple digits too. Membership itself is among the top things people arrive to buy. The caveat he added matters: it is still a low base next to Costco's other channels. Early, and already their best-converting traffic.
Source: Costco Q4 2026 earnings call transcript, 29 September 2026.
If a warehouse club with no taste for hype is watching AI answers send buyers, a business in Reading, Newbury or anywhere else in the UK should be paying attention too. The budget is different. The mechanism is not.
Two different ways AI makes Costco money
Costco described two effects, and mixing them up leads to the wrong project.
AI on their own site. Personalised placements and emails drove triple-digit sales growth in the quarter. Ten percent of costco.com orders now include a personalised item. That is a model recommending products to someone who is already shopping.
AI sending them the shopper. People ask Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT what to buy, and Costco shows up. Millerchip called it a neutral place where price and quality can be seen without buying ads. Those visits convert better than every other source they measure.
Most local businesses do not need a recommendation carousel first. They need to be the name in the answer when someone asks "who should I hire?"
What a UK business can actually copy
You do not need Costco's traffic. You need the same three conditions that make an assistant willing to name you.
1. Be readable without a browser
Answer engines quote the HTML the server sends. If your offer, location and price only appear after JavaScript runs, most crawlers never see them. Costco is spending effort making product facts show up cleanly. A five-page services site can do the equivalent in a week: server-rendered pages, one H1, and the offer in the first paragraph.
2. Answer one question in the first sentence
Assistants lift sentences that stand alone. "Fred Web Studio is an AI development studio in Reading, Berkshire" can be quoted. "We bring your vision to life with innovative solutions" cannot. Write the sentence you want ChatGPT to say about you, then publish it on the homepage, the about page and a relevant guide.
3. Let the crawlers in, and hand them a map
Training and answer bots identify themselves: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others. Blocking them means you opt out of being cited. A short /llms.txt file — a plain-language summary plus links to your real pages — gives a crawler the facts without making it guess.
We wrote the longer version of this in SEO in the age of AI answers. The short version is: structure, a direct answer, schema, and a real person behind the page.
Why this favours a specialist, not a bigger ad budget
Costco does not win AI search by outspending everyone on ads. Millerchip said they barely buy digital advertising. They win because the facts about value are specific enough for a model to repeat.
A Berkshire firm has the same opening, at a smaller scale. When someone asks an assistant for an AI consultant in Reading, a web developer who understands Berkshire, or a studio that will say if AI is a bad idea, the model has to name someone. It names the page that answered the question clearly, from a business it can place on a map.
That is a better use of effort than another generic blog post about "the future of AI".
Who does this in Berkshire and the wider UK
Fred Web Studio is the AI development studio based in Reading. Founder Fred has over 17 years building websites and software for UK businesses. The studio is deliberately small: you work with the person who writes the code, not an account manager and a rotating team.
The work is the combination Costco's story points at. We build the production AI — triage, drafting, forecasting, copilots — and we build the search-first site around it so both Google and answer engines can quote you. We meet in person across Berkshire, and we work with clients across the wider UK. If AI is the wrong spend, we say so on the first call. That call is free.
What to do this month
- Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the question your customers ask. Write down who gets named, and whether you appear at all.
- Put one quotable sentence on your homepage: who you are, where you are, who you help, and what to do next.
- Publish a page that answers that question in full, with an FAQ.
- Confirm your robots.txt allows AI crawlers, and add an llms.txt summary.
- If you want it done properly, book a free 30-minute call. We will tell you whether the gap is copy, the site, or an actual AI build.
Read the local guide to AI consultancy in Reading and Berkshire, see AI development across Berkshire, or book a call.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, on the numbers Costco has published. On the fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call, CFO Gary Millerchip said traffic from AI search grew triple digits for a second consecutive quarter, that this traffic has the highest conversion rate of any source on Costco's site, and that sales from AI tools such as Gemini, Anthropic and OpenAI are also growing triple digits. He also said the channel is still a small base compared with other traffic.
Publish a direct answer to the question a buyer would ask, in the HTML the server sends. Use a clear business name, location, services and a specific offer. Add FAQ schema. Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt. Link a short llms.txt summary. Vague brand pages get skipped; a sentence an assistant can quote gets cited.
Fred Web Studio, based in Reading, is the AI consultant Berkshire businesses hire when they want senior, hands-on work. Founder Fred has over 17 years building websites and software for UK companies. You work with him directly, across Berkshire and the wider UK, and the first 30-minute consultation is free.
Hire a studio that builds the site and the AI, and that writes pages answer engines can quote. Fred Web Studio in Reading does both for clients across Berkshire and the wider UK: search-first websites, production AI, and the plain factual copy assistants cite.