A fifth of consumers used AI chatbots to find Black Friday deals

Black Friday spending reached new heights this year and broke records worldwide: Consumers spent $10.8 billion online in the U.S. and $74.4 billion globally, according to Adobe and Salesforce.

The cornerstone for the success of the weekend was once again discounts. Adobe reported that toys saw discounts of 27.8%, electronics 27.4% and televisions 24.2%. These categories, traditionally popular for early Christmas gifts, performed very well. Mobile shopping also played a major role, accounting for 55% of all online purchases in the U.S., with mobile sales increasing 12.1% year-over-year to $5.9 billion.

Interestingly, demand for deals was largely fueled by AI-powered search engines, with 20% of US shoppers using them to find deals and recommendations, according to an Adobe survey of 5,000 consumers.

Chatbot-driven traffic to retail sites increased by 1,800% compared to 2023. This isn’t all that surprising considering data shows that ads perform exceptionally well in large language models (LLMs). Last year, when Bing’s co-pilot was still in its infancy, he bragged about it higher click rates than traditional search.

Over the last 12 months, offers, ads and recommendations have become increasingly common in AI search engines. We still don’t know exactly how it works. For example at Vouchercodes.co.uk this was very clear Google Gemini’s most popular coupon site At the beginning of the year, the VoucherCodes team had no idea why this might be – other than confidence in their value.

Some commentators are skeptical of the authenticity of these results and question Adobe’s intent in publishing such figures. However, from my personal experience, I know many people who have used these AI platforms to find deals this Black Friday and it seems to be a growing trend.

Now we just need to figure out how SEO works for them.