Holiday gift-shopping is quietly getting rewired, and NewsTrackerToday notes the shift isn’t happening in some far-off “future of retail” slide deck – it’s already showing up in how real people browse, compare and buy. A 24-year-old retail-tech CEO in California describes spending more than 15 hours a year hunting gifts, price-checking and reading reviews. This season, she says, she compressed that work into a fraction of the time by treating ChatGPT like a patient, always-on store associate – and, unexpectedly, enjoyed the process more.
That single story is becoming a pattern. Consumers are increasingly turning to AI assistants – from ChatGPT to Gemini to Perplexity – to generate gift ideas, narrow choices, and sanity-check value. The promise is simple: less scrolling, fewer tabs, more decisions that feel “confident.” For retailers, the promise is bigger: the holiday season is where behavior changes stick. Industry forecasts now suggest AI could influence roughly $263 billion in global online holiday sales this year, around 21% of all orders in the period – a number that would have sounded absurdly high just a year ago.
The early usage data points in the same direction. NewsTrackerToday has been tracking a surge in AI-driven referral traffic to U.S. retail sites: between Nov. 1 and Dec. 1, AI traffic was up about 760% year over year. The base is still smaller than search and paid social, but the trajectory matters because it’s paired with stronger shopping intent. Shoppers arriving from generative AI tools are showing higher conversion rates (about 30% more likely to purchase), greater engagement (roughly 14% more time and interaction), and higher revenue per session (around 8% more) than comparable traffic from non-AI sources. Sophie Leclerc, our technology sector analyst, frames the shift bluntly: “AI isn’t replacing shopping – it’s replacing the exhausting parts of shopping: the filtering, the comparisons, the ‘am I missing something?’ anxiety.”
That has forced retailers into an awkward transition: they must stay optimized for traditional discovery while becoming “readable” to AI assistants that summarize the world instead of sending you ten blue links. Big players are choosing different strategies. Some are integrating directly into chat-based shopping flows so customers can browse and check out without leaving the assistant. Others are building in-house shopping agents to keep users inside their own apps. And at least one e-commerce giant is trying to block third-party bots from turning its product catalog into everyone else’s answer engine.
Under the hood, this is also reshaping digital marketing. For two decades, SEO rewarded keyword engineering, link structures, and paid placement. In AI-led discovery, the consumer query looks more like a paragraph than a keyword – “I need a gift under $20 for my niece who’s into skincare and hates clutter” – and the assistant tries to synthesize reviews, specs, availability, and price into one recommendation. That changes what brands publish and how they publish it: richer product descriptions, clearer materials info, more contextual use cases, cleaner data feeds, and content that mirrors real human questions rather than search-engine hacks. Liam Anderson, NewsTrackerToday financial markets analyst, sees the commercial implication: “If AI assistants become the new front door, visibility becomes a balance-sheet issue. The winners won’t just be the cheapest – they’ll be the easiest for AI to understand and the easiest for shoppers to trust.”
Not every experience is magical. Some shoppers still find AI suggestions generic, repetitive, or oddly out of touch – the digital equivalent of being recommended the same black turtleneck five times after you said you hate black turtlenecks. That’s why the most realistic view is a hybrid one: AI will accelerate discovery for people who want speed and clarity, while traditional browsing remains the “fun” path for those who shop as a hobby.
But the strategic direction looks hard to reverse. Brands are already shifting budgets from classic search tactics toward “answer engine” optimization – rewriting site architecture, expanding FAQs, building gift guides and scenario-based recommendations, and investing in product data quality so assistants don’t misread them. From our perspective at News Tracker Today, the holiday season is acting as the stress test: if AI shoppers convert better and spend more per session, retailers will chase that channel – even if it means rebuilding the playbook they’ve relied on for years.
