How AI is changing Black Friday shopping

This Black Friday, the biggest shift isn't a new ad format or a new device; it's who's doing the shopping on a person's behalf. Here's what changed in 2025, what it means for the customer journey, and how retailers and brands can respond.

Key terms in this article

AI shopping assistant

A tool, often built into a browser, chat app, or retailer's own site, that searches, compares, and sometimes purchases on a shopper's behalf.

Agentic commerce

The broader shift toward AI agents handling parts of the shopping and purchasing process independently.

Commerce media

Advertising and placements that reach shoppers at the point of product discovery and purchase intent, across the sites and tools where that shopping journey happens.

Why Black Friday shopping looks different this year

Black Friday used to run on a simple assumption: shoppers browse, compare a few tabs, then buy on the day. However, that assumption started cracking long before AI entered the picture. The event has been stretching and reshaping around real purchase behavior for a few years now, and AI is accelerating that shift rather than starting it.

The scale of that acceleration is no longer speculative. Adobe Analytics measured AI-driven traffic to US retail sites up 693% year over year across the 2025 holiday season, and Salesforce's Shopping Index tied AI and agents to $73 billion in global Cyber Week sales, about 22% of all orders placed. Retailers running their own AI agents saw sales growth seven times higher than those without, 13% versus 2%, in the seven weeks leading into Cyber Week.

What changed is who, or what, is doing the browsing. Shopping assistants built into chat interfaces and browsers are increasingly the ones comparing prices, reading reviews, and narrowing options before a person ever lands on a retailer's site. For retailers and the media platforms connecting them to shoppers, that changes where the real competition for attention happens: less on the page, more upstream, in the query and the recommendation that leads there.

How shoppers are using AI this Black Friday

The use cases are less exotic than the framing sometimes suggests. Most of what's happening falls into a handful of concrete behaviors.

None of this replaces the shopper's decision. What changes is how much comparison work happens before a human eye ever sees a product listing, and the traffic data confirms shoppers using these tools aren't just browsing more; they're converting more. Adobe found AI-referred shoppers converted 31% more than other traffic sources across the 2025 holiday season, nearly double the gap from the year before.

How AI is changing the Black Friday customer journey

As we already established, the traditional Black Friday journey followed a fairly fixed order: browse, compare across a few sites, check reviews, add to cart, check out. Every step was something the shopper did directly, on a page built for a human to read.

The AI-assisted version compresses several of those steps into one exchange. A shopper describes what they want, an assistant compares options against retailer data, and what reaches the shopper is already narrowed, sometimes down to a single recommendation.

That compression shows up directly in the numbers: AI-driven conversions were 38% higher than non-AI traffic on Black Friday itself, per Adobe, meaning the shoppers who arrive already assisted are meaningfully more decided by the time they land.

Comparison and cashback destinations, the sites shoppers used to visit specifically to find a better price, face a real question here. If an agent does that comparison inside a chat window, traffic that used to flow through dedicated comparison and deal sites now has a new competitor for that role.

This doesn't mean the journey gets reduced to one step. Most shoppers still want to see the product themselves, and most retailers still need a page to convert on, but the path to that page is increasingly assisted rather than self-directed. That has real implications for anyone whose Black Friday strategy assumes the shopper is the one doing all the searching.

How retailers can prepare for AI-powered shopping

The instinct is to treat AI shopping prep as a Black Friday week problem. The CMT platform data says otherwise: in 2025, buying activity and pricing pressure started ramping roughly two weeks before Black Friday itself, well before the weekend most retailers plan around.

Waiting until the week of the event means showing up after the market has already repriced, and the same logic applies to AI readiness, where Salesforce's 7x growth gap between agent-ready and non-agent retailers had already opened before Cyber Week even started.

How brands can get discovered in AI shopping

Getting surfaced by an AI shopping assistant runs on different mechanics than ranking on a search results page. An assistant is synthesizing an answer, not listing ten blue links, so what it pulls from tends to be sources it can trust and cite cleanly.

None of this replaces traditional SEO or paid visibility. It sits alongside them, aimed at a different reader: one that's summarizing on a shopper's behalf rather than ranking pages for one.

Closing

Black Friday hasn't stopped being about great offers; it's just gained a new layer of decision-making in front of them. The retailers and brands paying attention to that layer now will be the ones AI assistants are recommending by the time the weekend arrives. The ones who start preparing today will be the ones shoppers, and their artificial assistants, find first.