AI Shopping Statistics 2026: How Consumers Shop With AI, and What It Means for Ecommerce

Last updated November 12, 2026.

About half of consumers now shop with AI, and AI-referred traffic to US retail sites grew 693% in the 2025 holiday season. This page collects the most important 2026 statistics on AI shopping, from consumer adoption and conversion rates to Shopify's AI growth and agentic commerce forecasts. Every figure links to its original source, and we add our own analysis and first-party data.

Key AI shopping statistics for 2026

• About half of consumers now shop with AI, according to McKinsey's June 2026 survey of about 21,000 consumers.
• 68% of US consumers used at least one AI tool while shopping in the past three months, according to ICSC and McKinsey.
• 14% of AI users have completed a purchase through an AI tool, roughly 1 in 7, according to McKinsey.
• 693.4%: the growth in AI-referred traffic to US retail sites in the 2025 holiday season, according to Adobe.
• About 18 times: AI traffic to US retail sites in the 2026 holiday season compared with 2024, if Adobe's forecast holds (our calculation).
• 31%: how much better AI referrals converted than other traffic in the 2025 holiday season, according to Adobe.
• Up to $1 trillion: US business-to-consumer retail revenue through agentic commerce by 2030, according to ICSC and McKinsey.

How many consumers use AI to shop?

About half, worldwide. McKinsey's June 2026 survey of about 21,000 consumers in 11 markets found roughly half now shop with AI. In the US, 68% of consumers used at least one AI tool while shopping in the past three months, according to a 2026 survey of 3,004 US consumers by ICSC and McKinsey.

What the surveys show about who shops with AI:

• Younger shoppers lead. Gen Z and millennials are more likely to use AI for shopping than older consumers, according to McKinsey.
• The US is behind. Despite leading in AI investment, US consumers trail the global average in AI shopping, according to McKinsey. China and India are about 29 percentage points ahead of the average of other markets.
• Trust is still building. 47% of consumers said they trust AI, in Adobe's 2025 holiday consumer survey.

Sources: McKinsey, "Who wins when AI does the shopping?" (October 28, 2026); ICSC and McKinsey, "Shopping in the Age of AI" (April 2026), as reported by Retail Dive; Adobe.

How many shoppers actually buy through AI?

Far fewer than use it for research. Globally, 14% of AI users have used an AI tool to complete a purchase, about 9% of the general population, according to McKinsey. That's roughly 1 in 7 AI users, by our calculation. In the US, between 7% and 18% of AI users completed purchases through AI, depending on the category.

McKinsey found apparel led US AI purchases in 2026, up 8.5 percentage points from 2025. When AI users do buy, they're about as likely to use a retailer's own AI assistant (15%) as a stand-alone AI tool (14%).

The gap between research and purchase matters for brands: most AI shopping today shapes which products make the shortlist, and the sale often still happens on the brand's own site. Source: McKinsey's Agentic Commerce Consumer Survey, June 2026.

How fast is AI traffic to retail sites growing?

Very fast, though the growth rate is slowing as the base gets bigger. Adobe recorded a 693.4% rise in AI-referred traffic to US retail sites in the 2025 holiday season and forecasts a 130% rise for 2026. Combined, that would put this holiday season's AI traffic at roughly 18 times its 2024 level, by our calculation.

• 2025 holiday season: AI traffic to US retail sites rose 693.4% year over year, the strongest growth of any industry Adobe tracks. It peaked at 769% growth in November, and rose 670% on Cyber Monday.
• Early 2026: AI-referred traffic to retail sites rose 393% year over year in Q1 2026, according to Adobe's Q1 report as covered by FashionUnited.
• 2026 holiday forecast: Adobe expects AI traffic to rise 130%, with the biggest jumps on Thanksgiving (up 159%), Black Friday (up 95%) and Cyber Monday (up 88%).

Adobe measures AI traffic as shoppers clicking a link from a generative AI tool to a retail site, across more than 1 trillion visits to US retail sites. Sources: Adobe's 2025 holiday analysis and 2026 holiday forecast.

Does AI shopping traffic convert better than other traffic?

Yes. Adobe found AI referrals converted 31% better than other traffic sources in the 2025 holiday season, and 54% better on Thanksgiving. Shopify reported AI-referred traffic to its stores converted about 50% higher than organic search in Q1 2026. AI shoppers also return less: 69% say they're less likely to return an item bought with an AI assistant's help.

Sources: Adobe's 2025 holiday analysis, Adobe research summaries and 2026 holiday report; Shopify's AI search insights.

How is AI shopping growing on Shopify?

Quickly. In Q1 2026, AI-referred sessions to Shopify stores grew about 8 times year over year and orders nearly 13 times, according to Shopify. AI-referred orders were still up 3.3 times year over year in Q3 2026. Since October 28, 2026, shoppers can also pay with Shop Pay inside personal AI agents.

• Agentic Storefronts share Shopify merchants' products with AI channels such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode and Meta, through Shopify Catalog.
• Shop Pay in AI agents: Shopify's Fall '26 Edition brought Shop Pay checkout into Muse from Meta, Claude Duet and Instinct.
• Growth in context: Shopify's merchants processed $119.1 billion in GMV in Q3 2026, up 29%, so AI orders are growing far faster than Shopify overall.

Sources: Shopify's AI search insights; coverage of Shopify's Q3 2026 earnings call; Shopify's Q3 2026 results. See our Shopify Editions Fall 2026 guide.

Which AI tools are shoppers using?

ChatGPT and Gemini have the largest audiences. OpenAI says ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion people a week, and Google says more than 1 billion people use the Gemini app every month. Both now support shopping, and OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT on November 10, 2026, letting businesses claim their profiles and publish branded agents.

• ChatGPT: 1.2 billion weekly users, according to OpenAI's Businesses in ChatGPT announcement.
• Gemini: more than 1 billion monthly users, according to Google (August 2026), as cited by McKinsey.
• Retailer assistants: McKinsey found AI users who buy are about as likely to use a retailer's own AI assistant as a stand-alone tool.

Our guide to Businesses in ChatGPT for Shopify brands covers what OpenAI's launch means for stores.

How big will agentic commerce get?

ICSC and McKinsey project that agentic commerce could account for up to $1 trillion in US business-to-consumer retail revenue by 2030. McKinsey puts the global figure at $3 trillion to $5 trillion. The projection covers sales that AI agents help orchestrate, not only purchases an agent completes on its own.

These are scenario-based projections, not measured sales. Today's measured figures, such as McKinsey's 14% of AI users buying through AI, show how far adoption still has to go. Sources: ICSC and McKinsey (April 2026), as reported by Retail Dive and others.

What does our own data show about AI search?

AI-style questions are already reaching ecommerce content through Google. In Solo Media Group's Search Console data, queries written like AI prompts, not typed searches, landed on our Klaviyo guide at positions 1 to 3 in September and October 2026. One began "context: location: united states... question:".

Two of those queries ranked at position 1. We can't see which AI tool sent each query, only that they're phrased like prompts. Source: Solo Media Group's Google Search Console data, September to October 2026. The full query list, and what earns these placements, are in our guide to LLM SEO for Shopify.

What do these statistics mean for ecommerce brands?

AI is becoming a shopping channel that converts well but sells mostly through your own site, for now. Brands need product data AI tools can read, store facts they can quote, and pages that answer questions directly. The brands that show up accurately in AI answers will capture the traffic as purchases inside agents grow.

• Product data: complete titles, attributes, variants and prices, which AI shopping channels read.
• Store facts: returns, shipping and contact details published where AI agents can find them, such as Shopify's knowledge base.
• Content: question-led pages with direct answers and sourced facts.
• Measurement: track AI referrals in analytics, for example ChatGPT's utm_source=chatgpt.com.

How we compiled these statistics

We use primary sources wherever possible: Adobe, McKinsey, ICSC, Shopify, OpenAI and Google. Where we rely on coverage of a source, we say so. We label our own calculations and first-party data, and we leave out figures we can't trace to an original study.

• Adobe measures AI-referred traffic across more than 1 trillion visits to US retail sites, and runs consumer surveys.
• McKinsey's Agentic Commerce Consumer Survey (June 2026) covered about 21,000 consumers in 11 markets; the ICSC and McKinsey report surveyed 3,004 US consumers.
• Our calculations: the 18x figure chains Adobe's 693.4% (2025) and forecast 130% (2026) growth rates; "1 in 7" converts McKinsey's 14%.
• Different studies measure different things, so compare figures within a source rather than across sources.

We update this page as new data is published. Last reviewed November 2026.

How to cite this page

You're welcome to use these statistics. Please credit the original source of each figure and link to this page as the compilation:

Source: Solo Media Group, "AI Shopping Statistics 2026," solomediagroup.com/blogs/insights/ai-shopping-statistics (updated November 2026), compiling data from Adobe, McKinsey, ICSC, Shopify and OpenAI.

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