Both Consumers & Technology Are Ready for AI Shopping — Are You? [New Report]

A little over three years ago, in November 2022, ChatGPT launched to the public. In the short window since, generative AI has gone from a computer science niche to a tool that nearly three-quarters of consumers across the US, UK, and France have actively used. 

That's according to new research from our joint report with AWS, DataDome, and Retail Economics, which surveyed 6,000 consumers and analyzed data from approximately 200 retail and e-commerce websites. And with more than a third of respondents reporting using AI for shopping tasks like finding and comparing products, it means AI-assisted shopping is already here, and the pace of adoption shows no sign of slowing.

Consumers are warming up to AI, necessitating supporting infrastructure

To put that adoption rate into perspective, it took smartphones roughly a decade to reach comparable usage, and as consumer behavior is shifting toward AI-assisted discovery, the systems being built to serve those consumers are scaling even faster than adoption itself.

Our analysis found that AI-driven bot traffic to retail and e-commerce websites grew 5.4x over the course of 2025. 

That growth wasn't steady. It spiked sharply around key platform-level developments. For example, when OpenAI rolled out its agentic commerce capabilities, including in-chat purchasing features, visits from OpenAI to retail websites jumped 200% month-over-month. 

This is impactful because the way AI platforms interact with retail sites looks nothing like traditional search. Google generates roughly one visit for every six crawls of your site, but OpenAI generates one visit for every 198 crawls. That’s because AI systems, unlike traditional search, don’t stop at indexing the data they scrape. They're ingesting your product data, comparing it, validating it, and using it to shape responses and recommendations within their own interfaces, and much of this happens before a shopper ever lands on your site. 

More crawls per click also means a tax on website infrastructure, which brands can prepare for by pre-rendering webpages to offload the increasing pressure of AI bot traffic. For large sites with millions of pages, using a solution like SpeedWorkers to do this automatically will be necessary. 

Not all categories are feeling the spike equally

The surge in AI-driven crawling varies significantly across categories. Those with highly dynamic data where prices, stock levels, product specs, etc., change frequently are being crawled far more intensively. 

Our data shows that food and grocery experienced a 29x increase in AI bot traffic growth over 2025, while home and DIY saw an 11x jump. AI systems appear to prioritize categories based on how frequently data changes, not just how large the market is.

On the consumer side, categories that combine high spend with complex decision-making (like electronics and appliances) are where trust and willingness to use AI for shopping are highest. These are the categories that will likely feel the impact of agentic search first and most acutely.

The AI trust gap is still there, but it's closing

AI adoption is growing, but trust in the tech is still evolving. About a third of consumers across the markets we surveyed say they don't yet trust AI-enabled search and discovery, and nearly half say browsing and discovering products is something they want to do themselves, rather than hand off to a machine.

Understanding where your customers fall on the spectrum of AI trust is crucial for knowing how aggressively to lean into AI-readiness. For example, younger consumers are already there. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, AI assistants and social platforms exert as much influence on shopping journeys as traditional search engines. 

The security caveat you can't ignore

There's one major complicating factor when it comes to AI adoption in e-commerce. As AI bot traffic surges, so does the difficulty of distinguishing good bots from bad ones. 

DataDome's analysis of nearly 700,000 live websites found that roughly 80% did not block or challenge a spoofed AI agent impersonation attempt. Most sites are wide open to bots masquerading as legitimate AI assistants, with consequences for analytics accuracy and fraud exposure.

That said, blocking all AI traffic isn't the answer. Brands that block AI crawlers risk losing control of how AI systems learn about and represent their products, because those systems will simply find information elsewhere, such as third-party sites and competitors. A thoughtful AI governance plan, one that distinguishes between the bots that help your brand get found and the ones that exploit your data, is no longer optional.

The role AI platforms play in the future of commerce

Recently, OpenAI announced that they’re prioritizing retailer apps in the near-term above in-chat checkout experiences. Keep in mind that as agentic commerce develops, the course will be shaped as we go. Even as OpenAI shifts focus, Google is boldly moving forward with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) co-developed with critical e-commerce partners like Shopify, and Google still drives the majority of brand visibility today. There will be inevitable obstacles as these platforms navigate complex solutions that span not only the customer journey, but also processes like fulfillment, returns, customer service, and more. Right now, it’s important to prepare for agentic commerce while continuing to optimize for AI and traditional discovery, ensuring you can be found everywhere consumers search as AI shopping evolves. 

What this means for your brand

The trends that emerge from the data clearly show that consumer willingness to shop with AI is rising, and the AI infrastructure to support that behavior is scaling even faster. The brands that will win in this environment are the ones preparing now, rather than waiting for a tipping point that, in many ways, has already arrived.

Preparation means ensuring your content is accessible to both humans and bots so that AI agents can actually find and interpret it, as well as rethinking the metrics you use to measure discovery performance, because traditional search KPIs were built for a world of page-one links and human searchers, and that’s no longer the reality we live in. 

Our full report, The Future of Search and Discovery: A Strategic Playbook to Understand Agentic Commerce, maps the AI commerce shift out across regions and shopping missions, including which types of purchases consumers are most willing to delegate to AI and which ones they still want to handle themselves. It also identifies four distinct consumer personas when it comes to AI-assisted shopping, ranging from early adopters who use AI as their primary discovery tool to those who rarely engage with it at all. Plus, we detail the new metrics that matter in AI search, and provide you with a practical readiness playbook with action checklists. 

We’re also hosting a webinar on April 2nd, 2026 — join us to explore these findings live! 

The transition to agentic commerce is already underway and accelerating. The question for your brand is whether you'll be ready for an AI-first consumer base.