As the 2025 holiday shopping season enters its final weeks, predictions about how shoppers would use artificial intelligence (AI) are being put to the test — and new survey results show just how often they turned to AI during the season’s busiest week.
At the end of the Cyber 5 — which includes Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday and the three days in between — Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights surveyed 1,022 online shoppers about how and when they made holiday purchases throughout those days. The full results, published in a new report, “Making the Most of the Holiday Rush and Cyber 5 Results,” show what was going on.
As new shifts in holiday shopping behavior influenced online sales, technology companies and retailers updated their ecommerce features to attract customers. As they did, AI played important roles for discovery, checkout and other agentic commerce-related functions. Amazon, Walmart and Target, as well as Google, OpenAI and Perplexity, put AI options front and center. So did Cyber 5 shoppers take advantage?
How often did holiday shoppers use AI tools during the Cyber 5?
AI platforms may not have been the most commonly accessed type of resource by holiday shoppers in 2025. However, they were an active part of shopping journeys for a significant segment of survey participants. Altogether, 8.6% of shoppers surveyed indicated they used ChatGPT or a similar AI platform to research products during the Cyber 5.
For comparison, that response was slightly more common than placing an order for curbside pickup (8.0%) and contacting a retailer’s customer service (5.8%).
Still, AI research trailed far behind the survey’s most popular answers, which were making purchases for oneself (45.3%) and checking a price on Amazon before making a purchase (36.9%).
Did online retailers benefit?
Data released by Adobe Analytics after the Cyber 5 appeared to show that shoppers were using AI tools to arrive at merchants’ ecommerce sites much more often than they did in 2024. In fact, Adobe assessed that AI traffic to retailer websites increased by 760% year over year from Nov. 1 to Dec. 1 in 2025.
In addition, Salesforce published data showing that generative AI and agents influenced $2 billion in U.S. online sales on Cyber Monday alone. As that occurred, the company, which provided agents for its customers’ ecommerce sites, saw the shares of global and U.S. traffic from third-party AI agents (including ChatGPT and Perplexity) triple from levels observed in 2024.
In the meantime, Salesforce also credited “AI-referred traffic” to ecommerce sites with conversion rates that were “8x the conversion that social channels did” during the Cyber 5 weekend.
In 2026, one of the major tests for AI discovery in ecommerce will be how well its conversion rates hold up against traditional search, as young shoppers look for alternatives and retailers brace for the possibility of Google Zero in ecommerce — the idea that clickthroughs from traditional organic search results could fade away almost entirely.
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