New data from Adobe shows that consumers’ adoption of generative AI for shopping applications has driven an exponential increase in AI-based traffic for retailers. The firm said Thursday that generative AI traffic has increased by 4,700 percent since July 2024.
Consumer-facing large language models (LLMs), like Perplexity AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, have put an onus on shopping-specific capabilities in recent months. The systems allow users to enter short or long-form queries specifically related to a product they’re hunting for, then pop up applicable results from specific brands and retailers. From there, users can click on brands and retailers’ sites directly—whether onto a landing page or a specific product description page (PDP). Adobe’s research shows that has started to change the way consumers research products during the shopping journey.
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Adobe said shoppers that land on a retailer’s site via generative AI show 10 percent greater engagement than those that arrive via traditional sources not linked to AI applications. The shoppers who find their way to retailers through AI spend 32 percent longer on companies’ sites and click on 10 percent more pages per visit than shoppers coming from traditional traffic sources. The AI shoppers’ bounce rates are also 27 percent lower, which Adobe said shows that AI tools have a unique capability to direct consumers to retailers and brands that have exactly what they’re looking for.
Although shoppers visiting a retailer’s site because of generative AI tend to spend more time on that site, that has yet to translate to greater spend than consumers who arrive via traditional traffic sources. Adobe’s data shows that shoppers entering a retailer’s site from a generative AI site are still 23 percent less likely to convert than those coming from non-AI traffic sources.
That gap has declined in recent months; in January, those entering through AI traffic sources were 49 percent less likely to convert than their counterparts, and in April, those shoppers were 38 percent less likely to convert than shoppers inbound from non-AI traffic sources, Adobe’s research shows.
The company said the narrowing gap shows that consumers prefer using AI tools as a starting point in the shopping journey.
“The conversion gap reinforces that AI is being utilized more during the research and consideration stage, in advance of when shoppers are ready to hit the buy button,” Adobe said in its report. “But the improvement in recent months [shows] that consumers are increasingly comfortable completing a transaction directly after an AI-powered interaction.”
The year-on-year surge in traffic continues to increase as months pass. Adobe also compared January and April’s AI-based traffic numbers to July 2024 figures, and saw a 1,100 percent and a 3,100 percent increase, respectively.
Adobe projects that trend will only continue as consumers continue to integrate generative AI into their lives. In July, the company projected that Amazon‘s Prime Day would see a 3,200 percent increase in AI-led traffic, and it noted that already, 38 percent of U.S. consumers said they have used generative AI for online shopping this year. Just over half of all U.S. shoppers said they plan to use generative AI for shopping at some point this year. Among those using AI for shopping, 53 percent said they use it as a tool to conduct product research, four in 10 said they use it for recommendations and 36 percent said they leverage it to find the best deals for them.
