Gen AI drives a 4,700% surge in traffic to shopping sites in the US: Adobe

Traffic from generative AI-powered links to retail websites has surged in recent months, up 4,700% in July, according to the latest data from Adobe.

“We’re seeing the momentum increase each month; we’re seeing the growth continue to scale,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, told Retail Brew. The surge, Pandya added, is being driven by consumer trust in the links shared by generative AI-powered platforms like Claude, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, among others being tracked by Adobe.

“We also ran a survey—in addition to the Adobe analytics platform data that’s informing the traffic spikes that we’re observing—and there, the consumers are saying that they really trust the links we see,” he said. “More than 90% of them trust the responses they’re given from these LLM [large language models] and that’s what’s really driving the surge.”

Adobe spotted the first big wave of generative AI-driven traffic to US retail sites during the holiday season. In 2024, from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, clicks from AI sources jumped 1,300% YoY—and on Cyber Monday alone, visits spiked 1,950%. While still small compared with channels like paid search or email, the surge marks a significant shift. The data is based on Adobe’s analysis of the universe of chat services and AI-powered browser experiences.

​​Momentum carried into 2025 as generative AI traffic to retail websites rose 1,100% in January and 3,100% in April, compared to July 2024—the earliest point traffic was large enough to serve as a baseline.

Consumers using generative AI to shop online spend 32% more time on sites and view 10% more pages, another nugget of data from Adobe showed. Bounce rates from this traffic are also 27% lower.

“You have a very strategic, conscientious, research-focused user who’s exploring on the generative AI platforms their options, then getting links, then visiting the sites, then spending a stronger amount of time on the site,” Pandya added.

The path to purchase, or visits that turn into purchases, has also narrowed considerably for these users. In July, generative AI traffic was 23% less likely to convert—down from 49% in January and 38% in April.