What do people actually buy with AI? Here's what the data says
Melvin Adu · October 19, 2026
Everyone selling online has a guess about what people buy with AI. We wanted numbers instead. So we read what the companies that can actually see this traffic have published: Adobe, Similarweb, Shopify, Salesforce, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
Here's what they show, and where the gaps are.
Beauty is the fastest-growing category
Similarweb measures the visits that AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity send to websites. From June 2025 to May 2026, beauty grew faster than any other industry Similarweb tracks. AI tools sent beauty sites 312.5% more visits than the year before. In May 2025, beauty sites got 1.0 million visits a month from AI. By May 2026, they got 4.0 million.
Fashion grew next fastest, up 278.2%. Online marketplaces like Amazon and consumer electronics came after that. Every category in the report grew by at least 115%.
The numbers are still small. Beauty sites got about 2 million visits a month from AI on average. Marketplaces got 46.8 million.
One more detail from the same Similarweb report: when people asked ChatGPT about beauty, 54.7% of the websites it named as sources were stores and shopping sites. That was on desktop in the US, in May 2026. When ChatGPT answers a beauty question, it points to places where people can buy.
Holiday shoppers used AI for toys, gadgets, and personal care
Adobe looks at more than a trillion visits to US retail websites. In the 2025 holiday season, from November 1 to December 31, visits to retail sites from AI tools grew 693.4% over the year before. Adobe says shoppers used AI most for video games, toys, appliances, electronics, and personal care products. Adobe also notes that the number of people shopping this way is still modest.
Earlier in 2025, Adobe surveyed more than 5,000 US shoppers. Of those shoppers, 39% had used AI tools for online shopping, and 53% planned to that year. Here's what they used AI for:
- Researching products: 55%
- Getting product suggestions: 47%
- Finding deals: 43%
- Gift ideas: 35%
- Finding unusual items: 35%
- Making shopping lists: 33%
That same report found visitors from AI were most likely to buy in electronics and jewelry. They were least likely to buy clothing, home goods, and groceries. That was March 2025 data, and a lot has changed since: visitors from AI now buy more often than visitors from almost anywhere else.
What people buy with AI on Shopify: specific, niche products
Shopify's president, Harley Finkelstein, shared new figures on Shopify's earnings call in August 2026. In the second quarter of 2026, visits and orders from AI to Shopify stores both tripled compared with a year before.
The most useful number for small stores: 75% of the orders Shopify credits to AI came from outside its top 100 product categories. His example was "a standing desk for a small apartment." He also said half of all visits sent by AI land directly on a product page.
So AI doesn't only send shoppers to the big, crowded categories. It sends them to the one product that fits a specific need.
Shoppers from AI buy far more often than shoppers from social media
Salesforce looked at the shopping of more than 1.5 billion people during the 2025 holidays. Visits from AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity roughly doubled from the year before. Shoppers who came from those tools bought nine times more often than shoppers who came from social media.
Salesforce also says AI drove 20% of holiday retail sales, or $262 billion. That figure counts every kind of AI, including product suggestions on store websites, so it says more about AI in general than about chat tools like ChatGPT.
What people ask ChatGPT
OpenAI studied about 1.1 million ChatGPT conversations from May 2024 to June 2025, in a paper called "How People Use ChatGPT". About 2 in every 100 messages, 2.1%, were questions about products to buy. Another 5.7% asked for advice about health, fitness, beauty, or self-care.
Two in a hundred sounds small. But the same paper says people were sending ChatGPT about 18 billion messages a week by July 2025. A small share of that is still a lot of shopping questions.
What this means for your store
Shoppers ask specific questions. Say a shopper asks for "a fragrance-free moisturizer for sensitive skin that sits well under sunscreen, under $40." AI can only recommend your moisturizer if your product page answers that. It needs to say the moisturizer is fragrance-free, list every ingredient, name the skin types it suits, and describe the texture. If those details are missing, AI recommends a store whose product page has them. We wrote more about how shoppers describe what they need and what AI assistants read on your product page.
Niche products can win. Shopify's 75% figure is good news for smaller stores. AI looks for the product that best fits the question, not the biggest brand.
Beauty and personal care stores are first in line. Beauty is growing fastest, and personal care is one of Adobe's top categories. OpenAI also counts beauty advice among the things people ask ChatGPT about. If you sell skincare, the shoppers are already asking.
Want to see how AI reads your store today? Run the free check on your store.
What this doesn't settle
- Most of these numbers count visits, not sales. Only Shopify and Salesforce report orders and purchases.
- Each company measures differently. Adobe looks at US retail sites, Similarweb at websites worldwide, Shopify at its own stores, and Salesforce at its own customers. The numbers don't add up into one picture.
- Visit counts miss people. Adobe and Similarweb only count a visit as coming from AI when the shopper clicks a link inside the AI tool. Many shoppers ask AI first and come back later by typing a store's address.
- Fast growth can start small. Beauty's 312.5% growth added about 1.5 million visits a month. That's real, but it's still a small share of how people shop.
- Surveys describe plans. Adobe's 53% figure is what shoppers said they planned to do, not what they did.
Where these numbers come from
- Similarweb: AI referral traffic by industry, June 2025 to May 2026
- Adobe: 2025 holiday shopping season results
- Adobe: March 2025 survey of more than 5,000 US shoppers
- Shopify: second-quarter 2026 earnings call transcript
- Salesforce: 2025 holiday shopping data
- OpenAI: "How People Use ChatGPT," September 2025
