The news: AI is playing a notable role in holiday shopping this year as consumers express comfort with AI-supported gifting and receiving.

• 64% of US adults would consider using genAI for holiday shopping this year, up from 11% last year, per HUMAN Security’s SantaGPT report.
• 36% would react positively if a gift they received was suggested by AI, and over half (52%) wouldn’t mind.

The clickless journey: AI is becoming an accepted shopping assistant. As consumers lean into automated product recommendations and start to trust genAI shopping paths, brands need to optimize for AI discovery.

• 29% of consumers have already made a purchase based on an AI-generated response, per Optimizely, and 87% of those people were satisfied with their purchases.
• Shoppers are especially likely to use AI when buying gifts for parents (41%), partners (39%), and children (35%), per HUMAN—all categories associated with high-intent, premium purchases.

Winning this clickless shopping journey means ensuring that product data is structured, accurate, and easily indexed by AI systems as recommendation engines become storefronts.

The limit: While 74% of consumers say they’d use agentic browsers to find deals or compare products, most cap what they'd let AI autonomously spend for them at $99.

Instead of handling the entire shopping journey from discovery to checkout, shoppers mostly want AI to help with coming up with gift ideas (39%) and product and price comparisons (33%).

What brands should do: With AI becoming a trusted partner for stressful gift-buying moments like the holidays, marketers have the opportunity to frame AI features—including smart gift finders or on-site AI-powered shopping guides—as stress-reducing tools to streamline the shopping journey.

On the backend, brands should tailor online content, promotions announcements, and product metadata to easily surface in AI engines. As AI agents crawl for price competitiveness and relevance, the accuracy and structure of web content will become a key part of customer acquisition strategies.

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