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The Black Friday numbers are record-breaking. $11.8 billion spent online, up 9% year-over-year. Cyber Monday projected even higher at $14.2 billion. And if you read any coverage this week, you saw the headline: AI-driven traffic to retail sites surged 670% compared to last year.
That 670% increase is meaningless.
It sure sounds dramatic until you realize it's off a microscopic base. Last year, AI shopping tools barely existed. Amazon's Rufus was brand new. ChatGPT shopping was theoretical. Perplexity was barely known. 670% increase reminds me of an old news headline about a small Eastern European country doubling their inventory of battle tanks (you guessed it, they purchased a second one).
The number that actually matters: 38%.
Shoppers arriving through AI tools were 38% more likely to buy than those coming from traditional channels, according to Adobe Analytics. That's not a small lift you can attribute to selection bias. That's a real difference in traffic quality.
Amazon's data makes this even clearer. Purchase sessions involving Rufus jumped 100% on Black Friday compared to the trailing month, while non-Rufus sessions increased only 20%. Salesforce estimates that AI influenced roughly 17-20% of all Cyber Week orders, driving tens of billions in global sales.
This traffic converts because it's different from the beginning.
Traditional shopping starts with vague interest, moves through search, filters through comparison, and eventually lands on a decision—if you don't abandon somewhere along the way. AI shopping starts with a specific question ("best hiking backpack for a weekend trip under $150") and returns a curated answer. The cognitive load disappears and the endless tabs close. You're not browsing; you're deciding.
This also explains why, despite record spending, order volumes actually dropped 1% while prices climbed 7%. Shoppers became surgical. They used AI to find exactly what they wanted at the right price, then bought it. No impulse padding. No "might as well add this."
Next year won't be incremental.
If 17% of shoppers experienced AI-assisted buying this holiday and told even one other person, you're looking at 40% penetration by next Cyber Week. And while 99% of this year's AI influence was discovery and research, a meaningful chunk of next year's 40% will include actual purchases—instant checkout, autonomous agents, the works.
Back-of-the-envelope math: that's potentially $5 billion in fully AI-transacted sales during Cyber Week 2026.
The shift from "AI helps you find it" to "AI buys it for you" is already happening. Amazon's auto-buy feature triggers purchases when your price threshold hits. Google's "buy for me" option completes transactions automatically through Google Pay. OpenAI's instant checkout in ChatGPT is live with select merchants. These aren't experiments, they're infrastructure.
Product specs are out, storytelling is in
AI agents can't recommend what they can't parse. But here's the irony: your "detailed product descriptions" won't cut it, but not because they're written for humans—they were never written for humans in the first place. They were written for SEO algos circa 2015 and legal compliance. They're full of specs but empty of context.
What LLMs need are stories.
A running shoe isn't "lightweight mesh upper with responsive cushioning"—it's "the shoe middle-aged 10k runners recommend when you overpronate and hate knee pain."
A laptop isn't "Intel i9, 64GB RAM, Nvidia RTX-5070"—it's "fast at video editing without the heat and fan noise that make Zoom calls awkward."
Problem statements, use cases, specific scenarios—that's what maps to how people actually shop. That's also what your product pages have never had.
The other uncomfortable truth: you can't optimize what you can't see. Unlike search ads or social media, you have zero visibility into whether your products were considered, surfaced, or recommended by ChatGPT or Rufus. You can't A/B test. You can't bid for placement. You're either in the corpus or you're not.
This Black Friday wasn't about discounts or doorbuster deals. It was about a fundamental rewiring of how discovery, consideration, and purchase happen online. The brands that figure out how to exist inside AI shopping agents—not just alongside them—will own the next decade of e-commerce.
Everyone else is just hoping their website still loads when someone manually types in the URL.
— Torsten & Peter
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