AI shopping just beat search at its own game on Prime Day

Amazon built Prime Day to keep shoppers inside its own marketplace. This year, AI shopping sent its best customers in from outside: a chatbot made the recommendation.

US shoppers spent a record $26.4bn across retail sites during the four-day Prime Day event, according to Adobe Analytics. The more interesting number is not the total. It is where the most valuable buyers came from. For the first time, people who arrived at a retailer from an AI assistant were the most likely to actually buy, GeekWire reported.

Shoppers referred by AI chatbots were about 40 per cent more likely to complete a purchase than those who came from search, email, or social media, Forbes noted. A year ago, the same traffic was the worst-converting channel of the lot. That reversal, inside 12 months, is the real story.

Adobe tracks billions of visits to US retail sites, and its Prime Day readout was lopsided. On day one, generative-AI traffic to retailers nearly doubled year on year, up 98.3 per cent. The visitors did not just show up. They behaved like buyers rather than browsers.

AI-referred shoppers spent 49.9 per cent longer on site and viewed 20.5 per cent more pages. They added items to their baskets at a 33 per cent higher rate than people from traditional sources. In other words, the channel that used to waste a retailer’s time is now its sharpest.

The pattern is bigger than one sale. Adobe data shows AI-referred traffic to US retail sites rose 393 per cent year on year in the first quarter. By March the channel was converting around 42 per cent better than non-AI traffic. Rewind to early 2025 and AI visitors converted roughly 38 per cent worse. The line has crossed.

Amazon’s whole model rests on being the place where the product search begins. That is where its advertising business lives, and ads are now one of its fattest margins. The Adobe figures point to a different starting point.

If shoppers increasingly begin with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity and only touch a retailer to check out, the discovery layer moves up the stack to the AI firms. So does the money attached to it. The assistant, not the marketplace, becomes the shop window.

Amazon is not standing still. It is pushing its own Alexa+ assistant and its Rufus shopping bot, and it is rethinking how much it pays for the AI models behind them. The catch is that the Adobe data shows general-purpose chatbots already doing the top-of-funnel work, often before Amazon enters the picture at all.

For two decades the journey began on Google. The same pressure now bearing down on AI shopping is the one cracking Goog