U.S. online shoppers referred to retailer sites by large language models are staying longer, viewing more pages and generating larger purchases per visit than consumers coming from non-AI channels, according to May figures from Adobe Analytics.
The data show a marked lift for traffic originating from LLM recommendations - examples named in the report include Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT - with AI-referred visitors producing 53% more revenue per visit than those arriving from non-AI sources.
Adobe's findings also point to stronger engagement and conversion for those visitors. In May, retail website visitors who were guided to merchant pages by AI converted at a rate 54% higher than online shoppers from non-AI sources, and they spent 53% more time on the sites. The firm reported that AI-referred shoppers also navigated to more retail webpages on average than their non-AI referred counterparts.
The share of retail site visits coming from AI sources surged year-on-year: Adobe Analytics reported a 138% increase in AI-driven traffic to retail websites in May compared with the same month a year earlier. Adobe noted that this represented the highest share of total retail visits from AI since the firm began tracking the metric in October 2024.
Adobe's analysis underscores a practical implication for brands: pages need to be structured so that LLMs can read and recommend product information effectively. Vivek Pandya, director of digital insights at Adobe, said retailers whose products appear in LLM suggestions are better positioned to "drive more personalization" for shoppers who leave AI platforms to complete purchases on the retailers' native websites.
These results suggest that AI recommendation channels are currently delivering both higher engagement and stronger monetization per visit for retailers that capture those referrals. Adobe's month-to-month and year-over-year metrics in May provide a snapshot of how LLMs are influencing shopper behavior online and the potential value of optimizing ecommerce content for AI visibility.