A shopper deciding between three laptops used to start that decision in a search bar, typing in model names and comparing specs across a dozen open tabs. Increasingly, they’re starting it in a single conversation with an AI tool instead, one that’s already narrowed the field to two options before they ever land on a retailer’s site. That’s not a minor shift in behavior. It’s a change in where the actual decision gets made, and most retail media plans still aren’t built for it.
A structural shift, not a seasonal spike
It’s tempting to read any single holiday stat as noise, a one-off tied to a specific shopping event that won’t hold once the season ends. This one doesn’t fit that pattern. Deloitte’s 2025 Holiday Retail Survey found 33% of shoppers planned to use generative AI in their shopping journey, more than double the 2024 figure, and the traffic data confirms it at scale: AI traffic to U.S. retail sites was up 670% on Cyber Monday 2025 alone, and 693.4% across the full holiday season.
What actually makes this different from past “AI is changing everything” claims is what happened after the season ended. Adobe’s Q1 2026 data shows AI traffic to U.S. retail sites still up 393% year over year. The trend did not reset when the promotional calendar did. Retailers treating this as a holiday-only phenomenon risk falling behind a change that is continuing beyond the holiday season.
The traffic converts, and that changes the calculus entirely
The obvious skepticism here is that AI-referred traffic is just window shopping, curious clicks from a novelty tool that don’t turn into anything. The latest data suggests that skepticism is becoming harder to sustain. AI referrals converted 31% higher than non-AI traffic sources during the 2025 holiday season, nearly doubling year over year, and AI-driven revenue per visit was up 254% year over year.
That conversion jump makes sense once you think about what’s actually happening upstream. A shopper arriving from paid search has typed a query and is still comparing options. A shopper arriving from a GenAI conversation has often already had that comparison done for them, they’re arriving closer to a decision, not further from one. Generative AI platforms saw the heaviest use in video games, appliances, electronics, toys, and personal care. These are categories where spec comparison and research genuinely matter, and where a well-informed AI recommendation carries real weight by the time a shopper clicks through.
The strategic risk is invisibility, not irrelevance
This is where many Q4 plans have a blind spot. It’s not that brands are doing badly in this channel, it’s that most haven’t checked whether they show up in it at all. Search and social visibility get audited constantly. Whether a brand gets recommended, or even mentioned, inside an AI shopping conversation is a newer question many retail marketers haven’t started asking, largely because the tooling to answer it is still immature.
That’s exactly why it’s worth asking now rather than later. A retailer with strong search rankings and a well-optimized site can still be functionally invisible at this earlier stage of discovery, and by the time that shows up as a traffic or conversion problem, the shopper has already made their decision somewhere else. The retailers who come out ahead this Q4 won’t necessarily be the ones spending the most, they’ll be the ones who found out where they stand in this layer before the season peaked, not after.
If you want to talk through how your Q4 plan accounts for AI-driven discovery, contact us today.
