How AI Changed Holiday Shopping in 2025 – Record $11.8 billion in Black Friday Online Spending
AI Doesn’t Just Suggest Gifts – It Drives the Cart
- Black Friday set an online spending record of $11.8B in Holiday 2025
- Shoppers are overwhelmingly using AI for research and product recommendations
- Tech companies have made it easier than ever to shop with AI chatbots and agents
Black Friday just set a new record: $11.8B in online sales. But that’s not the real headline.
This year, shoppers didn’t just scroll and click – they asked. AI-driven traffic to retail sites jumped 805% YoY, according to Adobe. Language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are now powering product discovery at scale.
40% of consumers used AI to help them shop. Among Gen Z and millennials, that number climbs past 60%. Harris Poll Survey
And they’re not just window shopping. Shoppers using AI spend more time on-site, convert more often, and lean on assistants to compare, decide, and even buy.
Welcome to the age of agentic shopping.
How AI Is Reshaping the Funnel
Shoppers are turning to LLMs for:
- Product research (72%)
- Tailored recommendations (47%)
- Deal discovery (43%)
- Gift inspo (35%)
That means brand visibility in LLMs isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s your first impression.
And unlike search, these tools don’t show 10 blue links. They summarize. Synthesize. Pick winners.
If your brand isn’t surfacing in their answers – or worse, if your competitor is – you’re invisible at the moment it matters most.
Globally, AI agents influenced $14.2B in online sales on Black Friday alone (Salesforce). That’s not a trend. That’s infrastructure.
Visibility Has a New Interface
This is exactly why we built Seshes.ai.
Brands need visibility not just in Google, but in the minds of AI. Our platform lets you:
- Run Brand Seshes to see how you show up in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others
- Compare sentiment, citations, and position with competitors
- Audit your content’s “LLM SEO” readiness
- Merge LLM mentions with GA4 + GSC data for hybrid insights
Because AI doesn’t just answer questions—it influences what people buy, recommend, and trust.
From Inspiration to Checkout
We’re seeing the early phases of a full-stack AI shopping experience:
- @OpenAI: rolling out instant checkout inside ChatGPT
- @PerplexityAI: adding PayPal to enable in-chat purchases
- @Google: testing “agentic checkout” across retail categories
And retailers aren’t sitting still. Walmart’s “Sparky” and Amazon’s “Rufus” are AI-native shopping guides. The entire ecosystem is tilting toward AI-as-interface.
Fewer Clicks, Bigger Carts
AI is also steering higher-value purchases. According to Salesforce:
- U.S. consumers bought fewer items (units per transaction down 2%)
- But average selling prices rose 7%, driven by tariffs and luxury trends
- Online orders overall dipped slightly, but ecommerce spending rose 9.1%
Even with flat discounts, AI helped shoppers feel smarter about buying—a signal that chat interfaces are becoming trusted price-finders, not just novelty tools.
What This Means for Brands
If you’re not monitoring your presence in AI, you’re flying blind in the next wave of digital behavior.
✅ You need to know how AI frames your brand
✅ You need to track your Visibility & Presence Scores
✅ You need to optimize content for how models think, not just how they rank
That’s what Seshes was built for.
TL;DR
AI is now part of the customer journey-from research to purchase.
If you don’t know how you show up in those conversations, you’re missing half the story.
Start your first Brand Sesh and see what AI says about you.
