The holiday shopping season is here. Will consumers ask AI to be their Santa?
It’s more possible than ever after a series of rollouts this year have brought shopping features directly into AI platforms. The latest, announced yesterday, is OpenAI’s launch of a new “shopping research” feature within the ChatGPT app that asks questions about budget, style, and use cases to deliver users a “personalised buying guide”, just in time for the Black Friday weekend. It builds on OpenAI’s previous shopping features, announced in May, and comes a week after the company’s biggest search competitor, Google, rolled out a suite of new updates within its AI Mode, boosted by its new upgraded conversational AI model, Gemini 3.
“It’s a huge product release literally in the busiest shopping period of the year, but it integrates all of the latest capabilities of our large language model (LLM) Gemini into the everyday consumer experience just in time,” says Sophie Neary, managing director of retail at Google. “Gemini is able to bring a more nuanced understanding of purchase intent that makes it more powerful than ever before.”
The platforms say they’ve improved their AI models so that consumers receive more personalized recommendations based on their search history, and can even get tailored sizing advice based on their interactions with other brands and the AI models’ ability to parse thousands of product reviews. In the last few months, brands’ marketing teams have been scrambling to get ahead of these AI models through the burgeoning practice of AI optimization (AIO).
For brands and retailers, emerging best practices include longer product descriptions with use cases, more product photos and more diverse website content, such as product FAQs. The biggest shopping event of the year will be the first opportunity for brands to gauge ROI on these efforts. In theory, shopping within AI search should improve conversion, as there are fewer opportunities for consumers to abort their mission along the way.
Early reactions
As AI platforms roll out commerce-focused updates in quick succession, early data suggests their simplified buying journey is driving up adoption. Direct referrals from AI engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity to leading e-commerce brands were up 752% in October 2025 compared with the same time last year, according to an analysis of 2,000 e-commerce brands by SEO platform BrightEdge. Yet they still make up less than 1% of organic e-commerce traffic, according to the same analysis, while ordinary Google search still drives 87.6% of all organic search traffic to e-commerce brand websites.
Marketing experts point out that in the run-up to the holiday season, even ordinary search is getting the AI treatment: Google has been quietly accelerating its rollout of shopping-focused AI features within its regular search. AI overviews for Google searches relating to apparel have increased 104% since November last year, according to BrightEdge’s research, and BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu tells Vogue Business that it’s rolled out a number of new features that are particularly helpful for the apparel category.
“In the US, where I live, they’ve begun to blend new kinds of formats when I search with a shopping intent,” Yu says. “Now, when I search for a holiday dress within regular Google Search, they’re making it more of an integrated shopping experience and prompting me to engage with their AI as I’m shopping from the get-go, taking me almost into a ChatGPT-like experience within normal Google Search.”
Yu points to an example of how a search for a Christmas dress returns an AI-generated list of common questions others are asking relating to Christmas dresses, a product grid of Christmas dresses that mimics Amazon and a separate search panel for its “ask me anything” AI mode. “Google is doing a really good job of getting the consumer to almost naturally engage with AI without realising it,” Yu adds.
How brands should respond
Proponents of these AI tools for shopping say that by mimicking a personal shopping agent, AI models will help match consumers with their desired products faster and more accurately, leading to increased conversion and reduced returns. Early data suggests that consumers’ use of AI search for shopping is particularly motivated by finding the best deal — of the 64% of consumers Shopify surveyed who said they’d use AI for at least one task this holiday season, 29% said they’d use it for deal finding, and 20% for inspiration and product discovery. As Black Friday weekend is primarily deals-motivated, this could mean AI has a significant impact on overall sales, if the models match consumers with the cheaper results they’re after faster than traditional search.
Experts are advising brands to incorporate longer and more detailed product descriptions within their own channels to have more of a chance of being picked up by AI search. More information on fabric composition, provenance, sizing and FAQ-style content that suggests when and where you may wear a garment are all details that lend themselves to the more conversational queries consumers are asking of AI search. Updating these regularly means brands can keep up with seasonal searches by suggesting, for example, how a garment can be worn for a holiday party.
“It’s funny — FAQs had kind of fallen out of favor in traditional SEO, but with agentic search, the idea of preemptively answering customer questions is suddenly more relevant than ever,” says Graham Mcculloch, director of e-commerce and performance marketing at AG Jeans. “We’re revisiting that format, but with a modern lens — thinking less about brevity and more about context, clarity, and depth. In some cases, less is no longer more,” Mcculloch adds, stressing that the brand is updating its PDP content and reimagining its site’s schema and structure much more regularly to keep up with the rapid changes in AI search.
Commerce-focused AI updates are still so nascent that brands have very little data to analyse how their early AI optimisation efforts may have been affecting sales so far, but Google’s Neary says that the next few weeks of holiday shopping will give brands their first actionable dataset.
“What I can say is that since we’ve rolled out AI overviews, people are searching more and not less. In Q3 this year, we actually saw our biggest increase in search queries, which is directly correlated to rolling out AI overviews,” Neary says, pointing out that searches of five words or more within Google are growing twice as fast as people searching with the old keywords-based search.
“It’s easier for people to find what they’re looking for because AI overviews mean we are better able to match people with the right product. If the service is good, people will use it,” Neary adds.
A more visual search journey
A core component of AI search is so-called “multimodal search” — the AI model’s ability to understand audiovisual inputs, including voice notes, photos and video. Neary says Gen Z has emerged as “power users” of these newer capabilities for search within Google — 10% of Gen Z are now starting their Google searches with a photo or image. Although Google Lens first launched in 2012, Neary says that when she joined the company in 2024, people were using it to search 12 billion times a month, and in November 2025, that figure stands at 25 billion times a month, since it’s been incorporated into AI search.
“What I think is really important for brands to understand is that one in five of those searches is someone looking to buy something,” Neary says. “So that’s actually really great news for fashion and beauty, which are such visual-first industries — it actually means they can create a more immersive and personalized way for people to engage in content online in ways that we’ve not seen before.”
For luxury brands in particular, a core worry has been that if AI search engines begin to host more of the consumer buying journey — from discovery to purchase completion — they’ll lose control of the shopping experience they’ve carefully curated for years. Several brands have been investing in AI-powered website updates like their own AI search and more interactive visuals, in a bid to make their DTC sites digital “world-building” destinations. AI search optimization experts say that thanks to the multimodal capabilities of AI search engines, this could also help them rank higher in the new era of search, and luxury’s multi-million-dollar holiday marketing campaigns are far from obsolete.
“Luxury definitely doesn’t have an immunity to AI search changing the marketing landscape, but their creative campaigns count in a very different way than they did before,” says Imri Marcus, CEO and founder of Brandlight, which helps brands optimize for AI search.
“Now, the visual content itself will count as much as the noise that’s being generated around those campaigns for the AI engines, too. So if people are talking about the campaigns on social media, and asking the AI about the huge productions and who’s cut deals with luxury brands, it all becomes a part of the conversation in AI engines,” Marcus says. “These campaigns are a massive spend that is already happening for the brands, but now it’s also about understanding how to optimise that spend for AI visibility, too.”
