New figures from Adobe suggest that AI traffic to retail sites will peak in the 10 days leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Traffic to retail sites from tools including ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode (measured by shoppers clicking a link) increased by 1,300% between 2023 and 2024. While this year’s increase is less than half that, AI shopping started from such a low base that the rate of growth remains considerable.
Since then, OpenAI and Google have paid more attention to the retail potential for their tools. Last week, OpenAI announced that it was allowing US users to start buying products directly through ChatGPT, at first limited to products from marketplace Etsy but soon rolling out to over a million Shopify merchants.
Earlier this year, Google launched AI Mode, which integrated its Gemini AI model with the tens of billions of product listings on its Shopping Graph. In a blog post earlier this year, Google vice president, product management Lilian Rincon said “It’s been incredible to see how AI is taking us into a new phase of shopping in Search.”
AI-powered shopping has also been growing fast in the UK and these new figures will be a notable warning for British retailers wondering the extent to which consumers will use AI-tools to drive their holiday shopping.
A Retail Week investigation last month highlighted some of the challenges that shoppers might face in using advanced AI functionalities like Agentic shopping.
Adobe say that the categories for which shoppers will lean on AI tools the most include toys, electronics, jewellery and personal care. It will especially thrive in categories “where there’s a lot of comparison shopping that needs to be done,” says Adobe Digital Insights director Vivek Pandya. He gives the example of buying a computer where a consumer might want to look at different specs like RAM and memory.
These figures were released as part of Adobe’s annual holiday season forecast. The technology firm expects US online sales across the months of November and December to hit $253.4bn (£188.60bn) this year – a 5.3% lift on 2024. Despite the $0.25trn milestone being surpassed, this is a slower rate of growth than was seen last year, with online holiday sales having increased by 8.7% between 2023 and 2024.
Adobe is also forecasting that spending through buy-now, pay-later services will drive a record $20.2bn (£15.03bn) in spending over November and December. This includes over $1bn in spending on Cyber Monday (Dec 1, 2025) alone.
Once again, mobile platforms are the dominant mode for online shopping. Adobe forecasts that 56.1% of spending will be through mobile browsers or applications, up from 54.5% last year.
Pandya says that this is an important stat for retailers to pay attention to as many continue to convert fewer shoppers on mobile than they should given their conversion rate on desktop devices. “It ends up being a bit of a hindrance to their growth,” he says.
Linked to this, Adobe is forecasting huge growth in spending driven by social advertising. The tech firm is expecting a 51% rise year over year this holiday season in spending, driven through platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and Reddit, compared to growth of just 5% during the 2024 season. Traffic driven through “affiliates and partners”, which also includes social media influencers, is predicted to rise by 14%.
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