Competitive Analysis
Black Friday 2025: The First True Agentic Commerce Moment
Black Friday 2025 wasn’t just another record shopping weekend. It was the moment AI assistants - Rufus, Gemini, ChatGPT, Walmart’s Sparky - actually mediated global retail behaviour at scale. Traffic patterns shifted. Conversion curves bent. The majority of product discovery for many categories began inside AI systems rather than search bars. Brands that were prepared won big. Those that weren’t… didn’t appear at all.
2 December 2025
8 min read
The Big Picture: AI Agents Drove the Weekend
This year, global Black Friday online sales reached new highs.
But the headline wasn’t the sales number. It was who drove them.
Across multiple datasets and press reports, a clear pattern emerged:
AI chatbots and agents influenced an estimated $14.2 billion in global Black Friday sales (Salesforce global estimate).
In the US alone, AI-aided journeys contributed roughly $3 billion in purchases.
AI-driven retail traffic surged more than 800 percent year on year (industry-wide traffic analytics, widely cited across BusinessLive, BusinessToday and others).
Shoppers who used a generative-AI assistant were 38 percent more likely to convert than those who did not (Adobe Analytics data reported by DigitalCommerce360).
This is the first time AI surfaces materially reshaped total retail outcomes on a global event day.
Amazon: The Rufus Breakout Year
Amazon was the most transformed platform of the weekend.
Across newswire reporting and expert analysis:
Amazon confirmed record US online sales of $11.8bn on Black Friday.
Multiple outlets reported Rufus usage rising sharply during the peak window.
AI-mediated sessions on Amazon saw significantly higher conversion than standard browsing - aligning with the 30 to 40 percent uplift seen across generative-AI shopping journeys.
While Amazon has not yet published an official Rufus session share number, the directional trend is unmistakable. This was the first Black Friday where a material share of Amazon traffic flowed through an AI layer rather than traditional catalogue navigation.
And that shift matters.
When agents mediate discovery, brands no longer compete for shelf-space; they compete for model-space - the structured, semantic, high-quality signals that determine whether a product is retrieved, ranked, and recommended by an AI assistant.
Rufus is becoming the default edge of that behaviour for Amazon shoppers.
The New Pattern: AI Discover > Compare > Decide
Across the datasets, the same journey keeps surfacing:
Discover
Consumers ask an AI assistant for options:
“Best sunscreen for runners”
“Quiet kettles for small kitchens”
“Affordable gaming chair under £150”
AI models shape the first shortlist.
Compare
Agents summarise features, cross-reference reviews, call out differences, check stock, evaluate compatibility - all in natural language.
Decide
The assistant routes the user directly into a pre-filtered product page or shopping cart.
This is not traditional search, nor is it remarketing. It’s agentic commerce - autonomous, goal-guided shopping flows built on your product data.
In 2025, this became mainstream.
What This Means for Brands
A few years ago, being unprepared for mobile search was survivable.
Being invisible to AI assistants in 2025 is not.
Three consequences stand out:
1. AI visibility now determines category position
The algorithms scoring relevance, authority, semantic quality and helpfulness are being trained right now. If your content isn’t aligned, you simply won’t appear.
2. PDPs need to be AI-readable, not human-pretty
Rufus and ChatGPT don’t “see pages” - they read your structured signals, bullet clarity, semantic consistency, review language, Q&A patterns, taxonomy and entity-level metadata.
3. First-mover advantage is real
The brands already optimising for model-surfaces saw disproportionate gains this Black Friday. AI assistants reward clarity, authority, freshness and consistency - and the gap compounds.
This is the same moment mobile search had in 2011 - but accelerated.
Where LMO7 Comes In
2026 will be the first fully agentic retail year.
The AI layer is now the primary customer interface.
At LMO7 we help challenger and mid-size consumer brands:
Optimise for AI search visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Amazon Rufus
Build agentic-ready PDPs with structured semantic alignment
Run AI-native advertising, including sponsored prompts, PMax-AI tuning and agent-aware keyword architecture
Measure Share of Model - your position inside AI results, not just Google and Amazon
Deploy automation-first content systems that continuously tune your brand’s AI footprint
If 2025 was the wake-up call, 2026 is the acceleration.
The brands that act now won’t just perform better next Black Friday - they’ll own the next generation of digital shelf-space before competitors even realise it exists
This year, global Black Friday online sales reached new highs.
But the headline wasn’t the sales number. It was who drove them.
Across multiple datasets and press reports, a clear pattern emerged:
AI chatbots and agents influenced an estimated $14.2 billion in global Black Friday sales (Salesforce global estimate).
In the US alone, AI-aided journeys contributed roughly $3 billion in purchases.
AI-driven retail traffic surged more than 800 percent year on year (industry-wide traffic analytics, widely cited across BusinessLive, BusinessToday and others).
Shoppers who used a generative-AI assistant were 38 percent more likely to convert than those who did not (Adobe Analytics data reported by DigitalCommerce360).
This is the first time AI surfaces materially reshaped total retail outcomes on a global event day.
Amazon: The Rufus Breakout Year
Amazon was the most transformed platform of the weekend.
Across newswire reporting and expert analysis:
Amazon confirmed record US online sales of $11.8bn on Black Friday.
Multiple outlets reported Rufus usage rising sharply during the peak window.
AI-mediated sessions on Amazon saw significantly higher conversion than standard browsing - aligning with the 30 to 40 percent uplift seen across generative-AI shopping journeys.
While Amazon has not yet published an official Rufus session share number, the directional trend is unmistakable. This was the first Black Friday where a material share of Amazon traffic flowed through an AI layer rather than traditional catalogue navigation.
And that shift matters.
When agents mediate discovery, brands no longer compete for shelf-space; they compete for model-space - the structured, semantic, high-quality signals that determine whether a product is retrieved, ranked, and recommended by an AI assistant.
Rufus is becoming the default edge of that behaviour for Amazon shoppers.
The New Pattern: AI Discover > Compare > Decide
Across the datasets, the same journey keeps surfacing:
Discover
Consumers ask an AI assistant for options:
“Best sunscreen for runners”
“Quiet kettles for small kitchens”
“Affordable gaming chair under £150”
AI models shape the first shortlist.
Compare
Agents summarise features, cross-reference reviews, call out differences, check stock, evaluate compatibility - all in natural language.
Decide
The assistant routes the user directly into a pre-filtered product page or shopping cart.
This is not traditional search, nor is it remarketing. It’s agentic commerce - autonomous, goal-guided shopping flows built on your product data.
In 2025, this became mainstream.
What This Means for Brands
A few years ago, being unprepared for mobile search was survivable.
Being invisible to AI assistants in 2025 is not.
Three consequences stand out:
1. AI visibility now determines category position
The algorithms scoring relevance, authority, semantic quality and helpfulness are being trained right now. If your content isn’t aligned, you simply won’t appear.
2. PDPs need to be AI-readable, not human-pretty
Rufus and ChatGPT don’t “see pages” - they read your structured signals, bullet clarity, semantic consistency, review language, Q&A patterns, taxonomy and entity-level metadata.
3. First-mover advantage is real
The brands already optimising for model-surfaces saw disproportionate gains this Black Friday. AI assistants reward clarity, authority, freshness and consistency - and the gap compounds.
This is the same moment mobile search had in 2011 - but accelerated.
Where LMO7 Comes In
2026 will be the first fully agentic retail year.
The AI layer is now the primary customer interface.
At LMO7 we help challenger and mid-size consumer brands:
Optimise for AI search visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Amazon Rufus
Build agentic-ready PDPs with structured semantic alignment
Run AI-native advertising, including sponsored prompts, PMax-AI tuning and agent-aware keyword architecture
Measure Share of Model - your position inside AI results, not just Google and Amazon
Deploy automation-first content systems that continuously tune your brand’s AI footprint
If 2025 was the wake-up call, 2026 is the acceleration.
The brands that act now won’t just perform better next Black Friday - they’ll own the next generation of digital shelf-space before competitors even realise it exists