Will AI Agents Become Brands’ New Acquisition Channel?

AI-driven traffic converts better than non-AI sources

According to Adobe’s latest AI traffic trends report, retail shoppers starting their journey on AI chats convert at a 54% higher rate than non-AI traffic in May 2026. Thanks to a more relevant, personalized, and informed discovery phase where AI agents cater shopping recommendations specifically to users, conversion is therefore stronger. In fact, 79% of consumers say they feel more confident in purchases made with AI’s help.

This has direct implications for brands. Since the beginning of e-commerce, retailers have designed websites primarily for consumers. Today, they must increasingly design them for AI systems as well, ensuring product pages, FAQs, customer service content and product specifications are structured in ways that AI assistants can understand and recommend. While this adds another layer of complexity to digital merchandising, the commercial upside might become difficult to ignore in the near future.

The reason shoppers referred by AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Gemini convert at higher rates is simple: they are already much further along the purchase journey. Instead of visiting a retailer’s website to discover products or answer basic questions, they often arrive having already identified the product that best matches their needs.

Relevance is arguably AI-driven traffic’s greatest advantage, for brands and consumers alike. Rather than entering a website at the very beginning of the path to purchase, shoppers have already received tailored recommendations based on their preferences, budget or intended use. As a result, purchase intent is significantly stronger, making conversion fmuch more likely.

This higher intent is also reflected in Adobe’s engagement metrics. AI-referred shoppers have a 36% lower bounce rate, spend more time on retailers’ websites, browse more pages per visit, and generate visits worth 53% more than those coming from non-AI sources.

Shopify’s recent data also echoes these findings. The e-commerce leader recently reported that AI-referred shoppers convert at nearly 50% higher rates than visitors arriving through organic search, while generating 14% higher average order values, further reinforcing the commercial value of AI-driven traffic.

AI Search Is Influencing Brand Discovery And Consideration

Beyond stronger conversion, AI is fundamentally changing how consumers discover brands. As shoppers increasingly begin their purchasing journey through AI assistants, brands have an opportunity to serve consumers at a later stage in the decision-making process—provided they are surfaced in AI recommendations in the first place. Having already received personalized product recommendations, consumers are often directed straight to a relevant product page instead of arriving on a homepage or browsing multiple category pages to find what they need.

This implies a big shift from traditional search. Through Google or other search engines, discovery and consideration typically happen across several websites before consumers decide what to buy. With agentic commerce, much of that evaluation happens within a single conversation before a shopper even clicks through to a retailer’s website.

The implications are already visible. While AI still accounts for a relatively small share of total retail traffic today, its influence is growing rapidly. Certain sectors are particularly well positioned to benefit, including beauty and electronics. Adobe found that cosmetics and electronics lead AI visibility thanks to content that is naturally well suited to AI systems, including ingredient lists, product specifications, tutorials, how-to guides, and customer service pages.

AI is ultimately compressing the path-to-purchase, with agentic commerce blending discovery and consideration into a brief conversation, which has repercussions on how consumers shop. Looking at it from a consumer angle, companies such as Anthropic or OpenAI are not battling to own the entire e-commerce journey. OpenAI’s retreat from native checkout was a clear indication that these companies don’t have the infrastructure (yet) to do so. However, they are gaining considerable ground on the discovery part of the shopping experience, and could slowly become very relevant acquisition channels for brands and retailers alike.