AI is having a break-out moment during the holiday shopping season. Shoppers are not just experimenting with AI to find deals; they’re using it like an essential tool to make purchases more efficiently.
By the time Cyber Week arrived, AI was no longer sitting on the edges of commerce as a helpful extra. It was embedded directly into how people searched, compared, and decided. In the weeks leading up to Cyber Week, more than 19% of global online orders were already influenced by AI and agents. On Black Friday, AI traffic to U.S. retail websites grew 805% compared to last year, and AI-driven traffic to retail sites also surged on Cyber Monday.
Adobe found that shoppers who arrived at retail sites through an AI chat service were 38% more likely to convert than those coming from traditional sources, too. Traffic from AI- and agent-powered sources like ChatGPT and Perplexity grew about 3.8 times globally and 1.8 times in the U.S. compared with last year.
It’s clear that far from gobbling up traffic, AI is sending shoppers to websites. And retailers are responding.
How AI Changed the Shopping Experience
Instead of opening five tabs, scanning reviews, comparing prices, checking Reddit, and looping back to Amazon, shoppers increasingly started with a single prompt. Best laptop under $700. Gift ideas for a nine-year-old who loves soccer. Quiet air purifier for a small apartment. The output is not a list of links. It’s a shortlist with opinions baked in.
That matters because AI reorganizes how influence works. Discovery is no longer driven primarily by search rankings, category pages, or even social feeds. It is mediated by models that summarize, filter, and prioritize before a shopper ever touches a site. By the time a user clicks through, the heavy lifting of consideration has already happened.
AI-referred sessions carry far higher intent because the research phase has already been abstracted away. These shoppers arrive deeper in the funnel and move faster, which shortens time to purchase.
At the same time, AI is removing friction in less visible ways. It reduces the cognitive load of price comparison. It normalizes the use of buy-now-pay-later as part of early decision modeling. It helps shoppers rationalize trade-offs between budget, features, and brand without manual spreadsheets in their heads.
For advertisers, this has several implications. Influence is increasingly front-loaded into the AI layer. The shopper may arrive already convinced. The job of advertising moves from persuasion through repetition to presence inside the verdict.
How Retailers Use AI
Retailers are not bystanders in this change. The leaders have used 2025 to embed AI into both customer-facing experiences and the plumbing underneath.
On the surface, the most visible move is the spread of branded AI shopping assistants. These are not novelty chatbots answering “Where is my order?” They handle product discovery, gift guidance, bundling logic, and basic qualification. Retailers that deploy them see measurable lift in conversion and order value.
But the more consequential work has happened deeper in the stack.
Retailers have spent 2025 fixing their catalogs for machines, not just humans. Product titles are becoming denser with meaning. Image libraries have been structured for multimodal parsing. Reviews are reorganized so that sentiment can be extracted reliably. This is the kind of work no consumer notices and every AI system depends on.
Retailers that do this surface cleanly inside AI-generated shortlists. Those that do not simply vanish from the first wave of consideration.
On the operational side, AI-driven demand sensing has played a quiet but critical role. While most retailers will never publicly describe their promotional orchestration in detail, the outcome is clear: fewer catastrophic stockouts in hot categories, tighter discount bands, and faster reallocation of inventory when products spiked unexpectedly.
The net effect: some retailers do not just sell more. They sell with less chaos.
What This Means for Holiday Advertising Going Forward
For advertisers, the lesson of 2025 is not that “AI is important.” AI is now part of the media environment itself.
AI-Driven Discovery Now Behaves Like a Performance Channel
AI sends high-intent shoppers. It shortens the funnel. It changes the role of upper- and lower-funnel media because the midpoint is getting erased. Advertisers should demand visibility into how much of their volume is AI-assisted and how that traffic performs relative to paid search, retail media, and social. They should pressure retail and platform partners to break out AI-referred traffic as its own reporting category, with clear conversion, AOV, and retention metrics.
Media plans should reflect this reality by treating AI-driven discovery more like bottom-funnel demand capture than pure awareness. If AI is delivering buyers, it deserves its own bid strategy, budget logic, and incrementality testing framework.
Product Data Is a Media Asset
In an AI-mediated path, your product feed is your creative. Shallow titles, weak attributes, inconsistent pricing, and thin descriptions actively suppress visibility. Brands that succeed inside AI shortlists treat feed management with the same rigor they apply to ad copy and bidding. That means investing in richer titles, tighter taxonomy, normalized attributes, and review hygiene across every marketplace and retailer.
It also means tighter coordination between ecommerce, media, and merchandising teams so that feed updates move as fast as promotional strategy. If your product data is messy, no amount of bidding pressure will compensate for being filtered out before the shopper ever sees you.
Retail Media Is More Competitive
As AI steers shoppers directly onto product pages, sponsored placements inside marketplaces become even more powerful because they sit next to algorithmically validated “best” options. That increases the premium on clean incrementality measurement. Without discipline, advertisers will overpay to harvest demand they already created upstream.
Advertisers should lean harder on reserve-and-release tests, geo splits, and holdouts to understand which retail media dollars are actually driving incremental lift. They should also rethink keyword and ASIN strategies to align with how AI narrows consideration sets, not just how shoppers type queries. The battle is increasingly fought at the point of validation, not just discovery.
Creative Has to Do Different Work
Panic-driven urgency is less effective when AI has already framed value and trade-offs. What cuts through now is clarity. Why this product. Who it is for. What it replaces. What it does better. Ambiguity does not survive contact with a machine summary.
Advertisers should pressure creative teams to get sharper about audience definition, use-case framing, and product differentiation rather than relying on generic seasonal language. Creative should be built to reinforce the decision an AI is already helping to form, not to introduce entirely new ideas at the last second.
The Control Point of Advertising Is Moving
By the time many shoppers see an ad in 2025, the decision process is already under way. AI tools now help shoppers narrow options and form preferences before they ever reach a retailer’s site. That means advertising increasingly supports a choice that has already begun to take shape.
Advertisers now have to work earlier in the journey by improving product data quality, marketplace visibility, reviews, and availability so their brands surface inside AI-generated shortlists. Creative and bidding still matter, but they now operate downstream of a filtering process advertisers no longer fully control.
Contact True Interactive
Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 did not just introduce more AI into shopping. They moved the moment of decision earlier in the journey. By the time many shoppers hit a retailer’s site, the choice was already shaped. That is the reality advertisers now have to plan for in 2026. And True Interactive can help you. Contact us to learn more.
Image by Franz Bachinger from Pixabay
