What We Learned From the First AI Holiday Shopping Season: Personalization at Scale is Finally Here

With more than 85 percent of global consumers having used an artificial intelligence-powered service in the last month, the first true AI-driven holiday shopping season has been completed. According to Adobe Analytics, online spending in the U.S. during Cyber Week reached $44.2 billion, up 7.7 percent year-over-year, driven in part by an 670 percent increase in AI-generated traffic to retail sites.

Three years after the release of ChatGPT, consumer shopping behavior has fundamentally shifted. Increasingly, shoppers are turning to AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Meta AI, Claude, Google AI Mode and others for product recommendations, research and purchasing decisions.

The questions every retail marketing team should be asking are: How do we succeed in this new AI-driven shopping world? What can we learn from the holiday season? And do we have clear visibility across AI platforms and an action plan in place to capitalize on it?

My company, Bluefish, analyzed millions of consumer data points across AI platforms over this past year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday to understand which retailers, brands and content sources earned the most visibility when consumers asked AI what or where to buy. What the data revealed was fascinating. While marketers know AI can personalize at scale, the level and precision of personalization across demographics, especially age and budget, were more surprising than expected.

Best Buy Wins Black Friday and Cyber Monday Searches by Owning the ‘Best Deal’ Story Across Categories, But Fragmentation Remains

The big winner was Best Buy. The electronics leader dominated AI search visibility by owning the “best deal” narrative across multiple shopper segments, while positioning itself as a trusted content source for AI recommendations. This is a strategy that retailers will need to replicate: build trust with consumers AND with AI systems.

Yet beyond Best Buy, the results were highly fragmented.

Shoppers were effectively shown different versions of the internet. Even when consumers asked identical questions, AI delivered distinct recommendations based on who the shopper was. For example, if a college student and her father both asked Google AI for a sneaker recommendation, they saw completely different responses, personalized to their specific characteristics: the student was shown Nike, while her baby boomer father was shown New Balance.

Our deeper analysis confirmed significant variation across categories. For Gen Z shoppers, the top-ranked brands were H&M (apparel), Best Buy (appliances), and Nike (shoes). For baby boomers, the leaders shifted to Nordstrom, The Home Depot, and New Balance, respectively.

For marketers, this fragmentation signals a major shift. Managing AI visibility at the brand level is no longer enough. Marketers need segmented, audience-specific AI strategies that ensure their brand is reliably recommended across demographics.

But where should brands focus their content efforts? Through our proprietary AI Impact & Influence Analytics, we see that AI platforms are prioritizing user reviews, trusted product review sites, and other third-party content over owned brand content and ad campaigns. This holiday season, the content sources that are cited the most are Reddit, Best Buy, Quora, CNET, Consumer Reports, and TechRadar. Marketers will need to respond by investing in content that AI trusts, doubling down on the customer experience, and ensuring advocates have the tools they need to share their opinions.

Best Buy offers a blueprint for what AI-era marketing success looks like: coordinated deal messaging across categories, strong product content, and a reputation as a reliable, expert source that AI can confidently elevate. The company actually created additional shopping pages across categories specifically for its Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. The pages include not only the discount and savings information, but also reviews, availability and even additional advice on how to navigate its offers.

Ultimately, the first AI shopping holiday season proved that brands must rethink how they show up in this new landscape. AI platforms will continue to refine how they evaluate sources and recommend which products to buy. The question is no longer whether you need an AI strategy. It’s whether your brand is ready for a world where every consumer sees a different version of the marketplace and whether you’ll show up when it counts.

Alex Sherman is the co-founder and CEO of Bluefish, an AI marketing platform.