Nearly 95% of QR code scans come from just 5% of codes. What gets consumers to scan?

QR codes may have become a pretty common sight on product packaging, but whether shoppers are actually scanning them...is another story.

It seems some consumers are at least willing to. A 2025 GS1 US survey found that 66% of consumers would scan a QR code on food packaging for information such as freshness, ingredients, and shelf life.

Still, what shoppers are willing to scan and what actually gets them to pull out their phones are two different things.

Scanova’s 2026 QR Code Benchmarks report, which looked at ~46.9 million scans across 8,514 live QR codes from 28 consumer goods brands, found that the typical active QR code on consumer packaging earns just 21 scans.

Moreover, just 5.06% of codes accounted for 94.5% of all scans, while the highest performing code got more than 2.7 million scans.

So, what actually gets shoppers to open their camera apps? For starters, QR codes directing shoppers to purpose-built product pages amounted to 28,914 scans per code, compared to just 4,017 for those sending shoppers to a standard website.

Retail Brew previously reported that brands including Recess and Vacation have used packaging QR codes to offer shoppers everything from deeper ingredient information to curated playlists.

“How-to” content also seems to be a winner; QR codes linking to how-to or tutorial videos averaged 19,181 scans, the highest per code rate among the use cases highlighted by Scanova. Still, just two of the 28 brands analyzed were using them.

In fact, even how the code looks could make a difference. Customized QR codes recorded 2.4 times as many scans as standard black-and-white versions.