AI Shopping Statistics (2026): 130% AI Traffic Growth + 87 Key Stats

A data roundup of how shoppers use ChatGPT, Gemini, Rufus, Alexa and other AI assistants to find and buy products, taken only from primary sources: Adobe Digital Insights, Salesforce’s Shopping Index, OpenAI, Amazon and Walmart earnings materials, and Google’s own announcements. All 18 pages were fetched on November 1, 2026.

Adobe forecasts that AI traffic to U.S. retail sites will rise 130% this holiday season, and in September 2026 that traffic converted 90% better than other visits (Adobe holiday forecast, Adobe Digital Insights blog). Pick this page if you need AI shopping numbers you can cite with the publisher’s own wording behind them. Skip it if you want market-sizing estimates from research resellers, because we left those out. The practical point for any brand that sells online: shoppers now ask an assistant before they visit your site, so whether that assistant names you is a measurable channel. If you have not checked yet, start with our AI visibility tools shortlist. Every figure below has a verbatim quote in our ledger.

Key takeaways

• 130% forecast growth in AI traffic to U.S. retail sites this holiday season, per Adobe (Adobe holiday forecast)
• 90% better conversion for AI-referred retail visits than other traffic in September 2026 (Adobe Digital Insights blog)
• 1.7 billion retail and ecommerce prompts on ChatGPT every week (OpenAI Ads)
• $262 billion of 2025 holiday sales were influenced by AI and agents, 20% of the total (Salesforce 2025 holiday data)
• 50% of shoppers say they use an AI assistant at some point in their buying journey (Salesforce 2026 predictions)
• 400 million customers used Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping in the last 12 months (Amazon Q3 2026)
• 63% is the average Citation Readability Score of a U.S. retail homepage, so over a third of the content is not visible to AI (Adobe Digital Insights blog)

How fast is AI shopping traffic growing?

Adobe measures AI traffic as shoppers clicking a link from a generative AI tool through to a retail site, across more than a trillion visits to U.S. retail sites. That makes it the closest thing to a census of AI referrals in U.S. retail. Growth rates are high partly because the base is still small, which Adobe says itself.

1. Adobe forecasts AI traffic to U.S. retail sites will rise 130% year over year this holiday season (Nov 1 to Dec 31, 2026) (Adobe holiday forecast).
2. The biggest forecast AI-traffic jump is on Thanksgiving (up 159%), followed by Black Friday (up 95%) and Cyber Monday (up 88%) (Adobe holiday forecast). Adobe’s holiday report page gives a different Thanksgiving figure, below.
3. Adobe’s holiday report page says AI-driven traffic to retail sites grew 127% in August 2026 and puts the Thanksgiving forecast at 141% (Adobe holiday report). We show both Thanksgiving figures because Adobe publishes both.
4. AI traffic to U.S. retail sites grew 71% year over year in September 2026 (Adobe Digital Insights blog).
5. AI traffic to retail sites rose 693.4% during the 2025 holiday season (Adobe 2025 recap). This is the base the 2026 forecast grows from.
6. On Cyber Monday 2025, AI traffic to U.S. retail sites increased by 670% (Adobe 2025 recap).
7. By month, AI-driven traffic to retail sites jumped 769% in November 2025 and 673% in December 2025 (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
8. Retail had the biggest AI-traffic gain of any industry in the 2025 holiday season; travel rose 539%, financial services 266%, tech and software 120%, and media and entertainment 92% (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
9. Salesforce found the share of global and U.S. traffic from third-party AI search channels like ChatGPT and Perplexity doubled in the 2025 holiday season (Salesforce 2025 holiday data).
10. Salesforce predicts 20% of all 2026 holiday ecommerce traffic will originate from AI chat agents, a mix of consumer-facing bots, autonomous agents and price-matching scrapers (Salesforce 2026 predictions).

Source: Adobe holiday forecast and Adobe holiday report, fetched November 1, 2026.

Does AI traffic convert better than other traffic?

Yes, and the gap widened over the last year. In mid-2025 AI referrals still converted worse than other traffic. By the 2025 holidays they converted better, and by September 2026 the gap was 90%.

11. AI traffic to U.S. retail sites converted 90% better than other traffic in September 2026 (Adobe Digital Insights blog).
12. A year earlier, in August 2025, AI traffic converted 9% worse than other traffic (Adobe Digital Insights blog).
13. AI traffic generated 83% higher revenue per visit than other traffic in September 2026 (Adobe Digital Insights blog).
14. AI-referred visitors spent 73% more time on site, viewed 25% more pages per visit and added products to carts at a 53% higher rate (Adobe Digital Insights blog).
15. During the 2025 holiday season, AI referrals converted 31% more than other traffic sources (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
16. AI conversions were 54% higher than non-AI on Thanksgiving 2025 and 38% higher on Black Friday 2025 (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
17. AI-driven revenue per visit was up 254% in the 2025 holiday season year to date (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
18. Shoppers arriving from generative AI assistants were 33% less likely to leave immediately, a 14% improvement since the start of 2025 (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
19. In the 2025 holidays, AI-referred shoppers spent 45% more time on site and viewed 13% more pages per visit (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
20. Salesforce found shoppers referred from AI search channels converted nine times more often than shoppers referred from social media in the 2025 holidays (Salesforce 2025 holiday data).
21. In its June 2026 Agentforce Commerce release, Salesforce put AI-referred conversion at eight times the rate of social year-round (Salesforce Agentforce Commerce). The holiday figure is higher than the year-round one.

How many shoppers use AI assistants?

Survey figures vary by who is asking and how. Salesforce surveys global shoppers for its Shopping Index; Adobe surveys U.S. consumers. Read each figure with its own base.

22. 50% of shoppers report using an AI assistant at some point in their buying journey, a 67% year-over-year increase (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
23. Consumer reliance on AI assistants as the first stop in the shopping journey grew 200% from May 2025 to May 2026 (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
24. Over the past 12 months, 21% of shoppers used a third-party AI chat assistant, 17% a social media AI assistant and 12% a brand-owned AI assistant (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
25. 74% of shoppers say they trust the product recommendations they receive from AI chat (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
26. Engagement on brand-owned properties dropped 7% year over year (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
27. The share of shoppers using traditional search engines and online marketplaces in their journey each fell 15% year over year (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
28. “New channels” such as AI assistants and social media surged 38% (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
29. 12% of in-store shoppers already turn to an AI assistant at the shelf for a style check or purchase advice (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
30. In Adobe’s survey of 5,000 consumers, 77% of those who used AI for online shopping felt more confident in their purchase and 69% were less likely to return it (Adobe holiday forecast).
31. In Adobe’s 2025 holiday survey, 65% of AI shoppers felt more confident after AI help and 68% were less likely to return the product (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
32. 81% of consumers using AI assistants for online shopping say it improved their shopping experience (Adobe AI traffic across industries).
33. 47% of consumers reported trust in AI in Adobe’s Holiday 2025 Consumer Survey (Adobe AI traffic across industries). Sixty-four percent of AI shoppers were satisfied with the links they got, and more than 55% said they click them.

How do people shop inside ChatGPT?

OpenAI publishes shopping figures on its ads site, aimed at advertisers. They are OpenAI’s own numbers and carry footnotes on that page.

34. Retail and ecommerce conversations account for more than 1.7 billion prompts on ChatGPT each week (OpenAI Ads).
35. About 43% of shopping-related ChatGPT conversations involve comparing and evaluating options (OpenAI Ads). That is the moment a brand is either on the shortlist or not.
36. U.S. product-search activity on ChatGPT rose 52% during the 2025 holiday season (OpenAI Ads).
37. During Cyber Five 2025, U.S. product-search activity on ChatGPT rose 47% on average and 94% on Black Friday, against matched weekdays in the prior four weeks (OpenAI Ads).
38. Newegg’s ChatGPT product feed ads returned 3× ROAS across campaigns and 7× during its two-week sale (OpenAI Ads).
39. Loop Earplugs’ localized product-feed ads delivered 5.1× ROAS and a 3.7% post-click conversion rate across five campaigns (OpenAI Ads).

How big are Amazon’s and Walmart’s AI shopping assistants?

The two largest U.S. retailers now report AI assistant usage in their earnings materials. Amazon merged Rufus and Alexa+ into Alexa for Shopping in Q2 2026.

40. Alexa for Shopping was used by 400 million+ customers in the last 12 months, with customer interactions up 570% year over year (Amazon Q3 2026).
41. Amazon added 100+ new capabilities to Alexa for Shopping in Q3 2026, from gift lists to Subscribe & Save changes by conversation (Amazon Q3 2026).
42. In Q2 2026, Alexa for Shopping active users were close to doubling and interactions were up over 5x year over year (Amazon Q2 2026).
43. U.S. customers who use Alexa for Shopping spend an average of over 40% more per order than those who don’t (Amazon Q2 2026).
44. Rufus was used by 300 million+ customers in 2025 and helped deliver nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales (Amazon Q4 2025).
45. Customers used Amazon Lens, its camera-based product search, 45% more year over year in 2025 (Amazon Q4 2025).
46. Nearly 20% of shoppers who interact with a sponsored prompt in Rufus continue the conversation about that brand (Amazon Q1 2026).
47. Walmart’s count of customers using Sparky, its AI shopping agent, is up 70% from last year, and Sparky shoppers spend 40% more per order (Walmart Q2 FY27 call).
48. Sparky weekly active users were up over 100% in a single quarter (Q1 FY27) (Walmart Q1 FY27 call).
49. Customers using Sparky have an average order value about 35% higher than non-Sparky customers (Walmart Q1 FY27 call), a figure Walmart gave one quarter before the 40% above.
50. Units purchased through Sparky grew more than 4x quarter over quarter, led by food and consumables (Walmart Q1 FY27 call).

Source: Amazon Q3 2026, Amazon Q4 2025, Walmart Q2 FY27 call, fetched November 1, 2026.

How much do sales depend on AI and agents?

51. Salesforce says AI and agents influenced $262 billion of 2025 holiday sales, 20% of all retail sales (Salesforce 2025 holiday data).
52. Global online holiday sales reached $1.29 trillion in 2025, including $294 billion in the U.S. (Salesforce 2025 holiday data).
53. Online holiday traffic grew 13% globally and 12% in the U.S. in 2025 (Salesforce 2025 holiday data).
54. Shoppers used retailers’ AI and agents for customer service 126% more during the 2025 holiday rush than in the two months before (Salesforce 2025 holiday data).
55. Retail AI agents handled 142% more tasks in the 2025 holidays than in the prior two months (Salesforce 2025 holiday data).
56. Retailers with branded AI shopper agents saw 59% higher holiday sales growth in 2025: +6.2% versus +3.9% without (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
57. On brand-owned agents, 37% of shoppers prefer semantic search queries, 26% use generative AI tasks like comparing products and 27% still use traditional search (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
58. 41% of shoppers say a brand-owned AI assistant makes them “much more confident” in a purchase (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
59. Salesforce predicts 38% of 2026 holiday retail dollars will be “hybrid sales” that mix digital research, AI tools or mobile with a physical store (Salesforce 2026 predictions).
60. Salesforce also predicts 1 in 3 ecommerce sites will have a site-specific shopper agent live by Cyber Week 2026 (Salesforce 2026 predictions).

How big is the 2026 holiday season overall?

The AI numbers sit inside a bigger online season. Adobe’s forecast covers Nov 1 to Dec 31, 2026.

61. Adobe forecasts $275.1 billion in U.S. online holiday sales, growing 6.7% year over year (Adobe holiday forecast).
62. Cyber Week is forecast to drive $47.5 billion online, up 7.4%, or 17.3% of the season (Adobe holiday forecast).
63. Cyber Monday is forecast at $15.1 billion, up 6.2%; Black Friday at $12.9 billion, up 9.2% (Adobe holiday forecast).
64. Thanksgiving is forecast to drive $6.9 billion online, up 8.5% (Adobe holiday forecast), and Adobe’s report page puts Thanksgiving mobile spend at $4.4 billion, up 11% (Adobe holiday report).
65. Mobile is forecast to account for 57.4% of season spend, up from 56.4% in 2025 (Adobe holiday forecast).
66. Buy now, pay later is forecast to drive $21.3 billion online in November and December, up 6.6% (Adobe holiday forecast).
67. $95.8 billion is forecast to be spent online in October 2026, up 8% (Adobe holiday forecast).
68. Adobe expects affiliate and social traffic to retail sites to grow 12% and 17%, and paid search by 4%, far below the AI forecast (Adobe holiday forecast).
69. Adobe says ecommerce will make up $1 out of every $4 spent on retail goods this holiday season (Adobe holiday report).
70. The 2025 holiday season set a record of $257.8 billion online in the U.S., up 6.8% (Adobe 2025 recap).
71. Cyber Week 2025 brought in $44.2 billion, up 7.7%, and Cyber Monday 2025 drove $14.25 billion, up 7.1% (Adobe 2025 recap).
72. Smartphones handled 56.4% of 2025 holiday online transactions, and BNPL reached $20 billion, up 9.8% (Adobe 2025 recap).

Can AI systems actually read retail sites?

Adobe now scores how much of a page AI can read and cite. This is where the conversion numbers above turn into a to-do list.

73. The average U.S. retail homepage scored 63% on Adobe’s Citation Readability Score in September 2026, so more than a third of homepage content is not visible to AI systems (Adobe Digital Insights blog).
74. Electronics leads retail categories at 79%, driven by category pages (79%) and customer service pages (78%) (Adobe Digital Insights blog).
75. Grocery scores 55% and general merchandise homepages just 40% (Adobe Digital Insights blog).
76. Google’s Shopping Graph holds over 60 billion product listings, and people shop across Google more than a billion times a day (Google shopping cart announcement).
77. In November 2025 Google said more than 50 billion listings fed AI Mode shopping, with 2 billion updated every hour (Google agentic checkout announcement).
78. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol was co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart and endorsed by more than 20 others (Google UCP announcement).

What to do with this data

The numbers point one way. AI assistants send fewer visits than search but those visits convert better, and the share keeps rising. The risk for a brand is not missing the traffic; it is never being named when 43% of ChatGPT shopping chats are comparisons. Three practical steps:

1. Measure whether AI assistants mention you for your category prompts. Mentionova tracks brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, and its agents draft the content that closes a gap. See our AI visibility tools ranking for alternatives.
2. Separate AI referrals in your analytics so you can see the conversion gap for yourself. Our AI traffic analytics tools guide covers the options.
3. Make product and category pages readable: Adobe’s scores suggest explanatory content gets read best. Our ChatGPT rank tracking tools and Perplexity tracking tools guides cover per-engine checks.

Definitions

• AI traffic (Adobe): visits to a retail site where a shopper clicked a link inside a generative AI tool. It does not count AI answers that never produce a click.
• AI-influenced sales (Salesforce): orders where AI or agents played a role, such as personalized recommendations or agent interactions. It is a modeled figure, not a click count.
• Citation Readability Score: Adobe’s measure of how much of a page’s content AI can understand and cite.
• Revenue per visit (RPV): total revenue divided by visits for a traffic source.
• ROAS: return on ad spend, revenue divided by ad cost.
• Cyber Week / Cyber Five: the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.
• Agentic checkout: an AI agent completing a purchase for the shopper, such as Google’s checkout in AI Mode.

Frequently asked questions

How much is AI shopping traffic growing in 2026?

Adobe forecasts AI traffic to U.S. retail sites will rise 130% year over year this holiday season, after 71% growth in September 2026 and 127% in August 2026. During the 2025 holidays it rose 693.4%, from a much smaller base.

Does traffic from ChatGPT and other AI tools convert?

Yes. Adobe found AI traffic converted 90% better than other traffic in September 2026, up from 9% worse in August 2025. Salesforce found AI-search referrals converted nine times more often than social referrals in the 2025 holidays.

How many people use ChatGPT for shopping?

OpenAI says retail and ecommerce conversations account for more than 1.7 billion prompts a week, and about 43% of shopping chats involve comparing options. It does not publish a count of unique shoppers.

What share of shoppers use AI assistants?

Salesforce’s survey puts it at 50% of shoppers at some point in the buying journey, up 67% in a year. 21% used a third-party AI chat assistant in the past 12 months.

How many people use Amazon’s AI shopping assistant?

Amazon says Alexa for Shopping, which combined Rufus and Alexa+, was used by 400 million+ customers in the last 12 months, with interactions up 570%. Rufus alone had 300 million+ users in 2025.

Do AI shoppers spend more?

Retailers say so. Amazon says U.S. Alexa for Shopping users spend over 40% more per order, and Walmart says Sparky shoppers spend 40% more per order. Adobe measured 83% higher revenue per visit from AI traffic in September 2026.

How much of holiday spending does AI influence?

Salesforce estimates AI and agents influenced $262 billion, or 20% of global holiday retail sales, in 2025. That is a modeled influence figure, not direct sales from AI clicks.

Why do Adobe’s Thanksgiving AI forecasts differ?

Adobe’s September 28 forecast release says 159% and its holiday report page says 141%. We list both and cite each to its own page.

Can AI read my product pages?

Adobe’s average U.S. retail homepage scored 63% on its Citation Readability Score, so over a third of content is not visible to AI. Category and customer service pages scored higher in electronics.

How can a brand see if AI assistants recommend it?

Run your category prompts through an AI visibility tracker. Mentionova and the other picks in our AI visibility tools ranking track mentions, citations and share of voice across the main assistants.

How we compiled these statistics

We fetched 18 primary source pages on November 1, 2026 and recorded 87 data points in docs/content/stats-ledgers/ai-shopping-statistics.json. Every numbered figure above maps to a ledger row with a verbatim quote from the page we fetched. Traffic and conversion figures come from Adobe Digital Insights (its forecast release, its holiday report page, its 2025 recap and two Adobe blog posts). Survey and AI-influence figures come from Salesforce. ChatGPT shopping figures come from OpenAI’s ads site. Assistant usage comes from Amazon’s quarterly results and Walmart’s earnings call transcripts, which are company claims. Google figures come from Google’s own blog. We did not use traffic estimators, third-party “statistics” sites or market-research resellers. Where two pages from the same publisher disagree (Adobe’s Thanksgiving forecast, Salesforce’s eight-times vs nine-times conversion), we show both. Related reading: AI search statistics, ChatGPT statistics and Google AI Mode statistics.

Sources

• Adobe: 2026 holiday shopping forecast (press release PDF, September 28, 2026)
• Adobe Digital Insights: AI traffic drives higher revenue per visit for retail
• Adobe: Holiday Shopping Report 2026
• Adobe: 2025 holiday shopping season recap (January 2026)
• Adobe: AI-driven traffic surges across industries
• OpenAI Ads: Holiday shopping in ChatGPT
• Amazon: Third Quarter 2026 results
• Amazon: Second Quarter 2026 results
• Amazon: First Quarter 2026 results
• Amazon: Fourth Quarter 2025 results
• Salesforce: 2026 holiday retail predictions
• Salesforce: 2025 holiday shopping data
• Salesforce: Agentforce Commerce release (June 2026)
• Google: Shopping cart and agentic commerce announcement
• Google: Agentic checkout and holiday AI shopping
• Google: Universal Commerce Protocol for retailers and platforms
• Walmart: Q2 FY27 earnings call transcript
• Walmart: Q1 FY27 earnings call transcript