The GenAI Holiday Blitz Is Coming—Is Your Site Ready?

By Robyn White: I’m a UX Director with expertise in content strategy and AI-enhanced user experiences. With a background in leading UX strategy and cross-functional teams, plus an insatiable curiosity about emerging technologies, I enjoy helping organizations create impactful digital solutions in the rapidly changing AI landscape.

Annie Deihl: Ecommerce, Marketing & Fintech Product Leader | Expert in Shopping & Customer Operations User Journeys | Business Strategist for Startup through Enterprise-sized Companies | Innovator & Transformer of Operational Infrastructure | Mentor

As the calendar turns to the second half of the year, if you’re in retail, you’re already strategizing about how to make the numbers this holiday, especially with all the headwinds this year. Tariffs. Inflation. Supply chain snafus. Cyber Monday in December. Annnnd then there’s AI. 

You’ve probably introduced some AI tools to your site. Chatbots, marketing automation, and pricing optimization are incredible steps in the pursuit of growth. Though we’ve noticed AI can have a sneaky way of adding work rather than reducing it.

While you’ve been busy optimizing for margins, your customer has changed how they shop online. Turns out, SEO and paid search are not dead (Alphabet Q2 Earnings), but they’re no longer the only game in town.

Instead of traditional search, customers have increased their use of Gen AI assistants like ChatGPT, GoogleAI, Perplexity, Claude, CoPilot, and others to find the perfect gifts for everyone on their list. From general research and product recommendations to price comparisons and deal hunting, this shift is part of a broader trend outlined in a recent survey from Adobe for Business. Adobe’s survey also shows this trend is growing quickly with no signs of slowing down as AI platforms launch newer, faster, and more robust experiences.

Prepping your site and brand to take advantage of these new shopping behaviors could give you an edge, and the good news is, you’re not too late to make updates. 

Get GenAI Holiday Shopper Ready In Three Steps:

The first step is something NOT to do: don’t drown in the tsunami of information. The sheer volume of new articles, podcasts, and yes, blogs, addressing this topic is dizzying.  

Remind yourself that SEO isn’t obsolete, so keep up with all your best SEO practices:

• Comprehensive, well-written product detail page information, including refreshed descriptive language that conveys new info and addresses the shoppers’ needs.

• Authoritative content that positions your products as the industry leader, for example, surveys, “state of the industry reports,” and white papers.

• On-point social media, including vlogs and video posts, like YouTube tutorials, TikTok Shorts with behind-the-scenes glimpses from your brand, and LinkedIn video posts. 

• Clear brand representation when your products meet your potential customers’ needs.  For instance, go beyond product details and include benefit-oriented messaging.

  
  

And guess what, everything you do for SEO, you’re doing for AI. This is one of the sources LLMs use to compile summaries and link your site.

Second, establish a benchmark for AI discovery, traffic, and referrals. You want metrics to help inform where to invest, build, and grow next year.

One way to establish this foundation is to capture how your brand appears within AI summaries and overviews. To get started, create personas of your shoppers and have them “shop” the AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, for your products to see what comes up.

Some prompt examples:

• "I need recommendations for [product category] that [specific requirements]"

• "What is/are the best [product/s]?

• "I'm comparing [competitor products]. Which would work better for [use case]?"

• "Where should I shop for [product] online? I care most about [persona priorities]"

Then, take note. Is your brand there? If not, why not? Dig into the brands being shown and review where the AI model is pulling data from. Yes, you can ask the AI to identify its resources, though some platforms are better at sharing sources than others. 

Third, lean into AI now to help with your contingency planning. Ask your enterprise-level AI model to offer solutions for the challenges you can imagine, and to suggest some you haven’t thought of yet.

You can even pressure check the plans you have in place. Using an AI model to brainstorm and think through possible scenarios is a great way to prep for the unknown. 

What’s Coming Next?

Agentic AI is in the ether. Over the next one to two years, autonomous AI agents will work on your behalf to shop for you, including finding personalized products, enabling virtual try-on, and even negotiating prices for you!

The shift away from traditional online shopping habits could ultimately mean that product discovery on your site will need to be optimized for both AI agents and humans.

One other important takeaway is to think deeply about who owns this in your organization because strategy and accountability will be key to implementation. 

The adage “the only constant is change” has never been more relevant. What’s new this year is the speed at which things are changing.

To stay sane, remember, yes, there’s a lot to learn, but successful retailers follow their customers. Keep them at the center of all you do, and you’ll find the path that works for your brand. 

Sources and Further Reading:

• Adobe for Business Research on the Explosive Rise of Generative AI Referral Traffic

• Google Q2 Earnings showing Search (including Paid search) is still growing

• SEO is so yesterday. The future is here is GenAO, AISO, and AIO - Our recent blog post gives an overview of getting discovered in the age of LLM search assistants.

• 7 Innovative Retail Trends to Watch in 2025 - A nice summary of the gamut of retail considerations and how AI is woven into these functional areas.

• Shopping in God-Mode - If you want to go down the rabbit hole of startup ideas that are brewing in retail and e-commerce.

• The AI Shopping Revolution: How Agentic Shopping is Reshaping Ecommerce - An overview of how agents will reshape the shopping experience for both customers and retail brands.

🎁 Share how you're getting your business holiday ready in the AI era. Let's discuss in the comments below.