29% of Shoppers Will Use AI This Holiday. 4% Will Buy There.
If you sell online, the holiday question this year is where AI sits in the buying process, and the biggest consumer survey of the season puts a number on it. PwC's Holiday Outlook 2026, based on 4,093 U.S. consumers surveyed June 15-26, 2026, found that 29% plan to use AI somewhere in their holiday shopping, up from 22% last year.
Then the survey asks where those shoppers actually decide and actually buy, and the two answers are far apart.
Where AI sits in the journey
When consumers were asked how they will decide what to give, physical stores led at 52%, followed by search engines at 42%, social media at 29%, and AI-powered tools at 14%. At checkout the gap widens: 60% expect to buy gifts in-store, 38% on brand and retailer websites, 9% through social media, and 4% through AI tools.
So AI touches roughly a quarter of shoppers and influences the shortlist for many of them: 68% of AI users say they turn to it to explore gift ideas they would not otherwise have considered, including 73% of Gen Z users. And 75% of AI users believe the technology will make their holiday shopping easier this year.
But the purchase mostly happens somewhere else. Of the consumers using AI for ideas, 64% keep opening a separate tab and going to a website to make the purchase, skipping the link the tool recommends.
What that means for a small store
What this survey describes is a purchase that happens in two places: it starts inside an AI tool and finishes on a website. An AI answer names your product, and then the shopper verifies it the way shoppers always have: they open your site, check the price, look for shipping costs and return policies, and read reviews. The 4% checkout figure says very few of them buy inside the AI tool this year. The 64% separate-tab figure says most of them will arrive on your pages ready to buy.
That makes the weeks before Black Friday a two-sided checklist.
The AI side: the pages and data AI tools read when they build an answer. Product schema that matches what you sell, consistent names and prices, and product data that survives being summarized. This is the work that decides whether your item makes the shortlist at all, and it is what our audits score.
The website side: the pages the shopper opens after AI mentions you. Price clarity above the fold (the part of the page a visitor sees before doing any scrolling), shipping and returns one click away, reviews visible without hunting. This is the work that turns that visit into a sale.
There is a third option for Shopify merchants: Google began auto-enrolling eligible U.S. stores into AI checkout through Merchant Center on September 22, which moves a small slice of checkout into the AI surface itself. We wrote about that rollout separately, and the feed data that controls it is worth checking before the season, because the same feed problems that hide products from listings also break the new checkout path.
Set your baseline now
One practical step before the season starts: check how much AI-assisted traffic you already get, in GA4 or your analytics platform of choice, and write the number down. When January comes and everyone publishes their holiday retrospectives, the stores with a November baseline will be able to say what changed and the rest will be guessing.
The share of shoppers who plan to use AI somewhere in their holiday shopping has already grown from 22% to 29% in one year, and it will keep growing. So will the 4% who expect to buy gifts inside an AI tool. The stores that come out ahead will be the ones that did both jobs: making their product information easy for AI tools to read, and making their own website easy for a shopper to check and buy from.
Sources
- PwC US, Holiday Outlook 2026, survey of 4,093 U.S. consumers fielded June 15-26, 2026 (pwc.com)
- Google Merchant Center AI checkout enrollment, September 22, 2026 (Search Engine Land)