• AI platforms are becoming a meaningful traffic source for online brands.
• The shoppers that reach storefronts via AI are spending more and driving as much as 70% higher revenue per session. 
• But for all the talk, agentic commerce has not arrived. Just 0.004% of AI-assisted orders were completed by an AI agent instead of a human. 

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When OpenAI launched Instant Checkout, many in the ecommerce world assumed they would need to quickly optimize their shopping experience for a new era of AI agent shoppers. The feature allows users to purchase products without ever leaving a ChatGPT session.

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But that agentic shopping era has not arrived. 

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And the ChatGPT maker’s recent pullback from Instant Checkout confirms what we’re seeing in the data at PrettyDamnQuick. AI is becoming a meaningful driver of traffic to merchants’ sites, but it’s still humans who are clicking the buy button.

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And that’s a good thing, as data from across more than $1.5B in ecommerce sales indicates that the shoppers being sent to brands’ storefronts by LLMs are very valuable. 

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Here’s what we found in the data. 

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AI is Sending High-Intent Shoppers to Your Storefront

People are increasingly using AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to help them with their shopping. A study of 18,000 global consumers jointly published by NRF and IBM in January found that 45% of shoppers use AI at some point in their buying process, with the largest number of shoppers using it to research products. 

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Once a shopper lands, what they see still decides whether they convert. That's where merchandising tools like Kimonix come in, sorting and personalizing collection and product pages in real time so AI-referred visitors find the right products fast, before they ever reach the checkout PDQ optimizes.

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According to PrettyDamnQuick’s data, the shoppers that AI platforms send to storefronts tend to be high-quality. 

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Compared to standard traffic, AI-referred sessions have:

• 20-25% higher conversion rates
• 35% higher average order values
• 65-70% higher revenue per session

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Shoppers using AI to discover products are demonstrating stronger intent at checkout, and they’re spending more, too. 

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Not All AI Platforms Are Equal for Ecommerce

The most popular AI chatbots show differences in shopper behavior. 

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While ChatGPT has the highest referral volume by a wide margin, Perplexity drives the highest average order values. 

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Claude, meanwhile, has the highest conversion rates with above-average AOVs. 

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Gemini and Copilot are smaller sources of shopping traffic, but they continue to grow. 

Agents Are Shopping — But Just Barely

AI is definitely sending traffic to ecommerce websites: It drove 7.8M orders in just the first two months of 2026, according to PrettyDamnQuick.

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But a mere 290 of those orders (0.004%) were completed by an AI agent. 

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In other words, AI agents are barely responsible for ecommerce sales.

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Interestingly enough, many of those orders happened on the West Coast, which saw 45% more agent-completed orders than would be expected for the region’s total share of ecommerce. 

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When agents do complete an order autonomously, they tend to purchase just one item at a time, according to PrettyDamnQuick’s data. Unlike humans, they don’t impulse shop and can’t be swayed by cross-sell or upsell offers. They arrive at a brand’s store simply to execute on a user’s request. 

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PrettyDamnQuick has always believed in the importance of treating each buyer as an individual, and that will still be true once AI agents arrive at checkout in a big way. 

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AI has changed how shoppers find your store. For now, at least, it still leaves the buying to them.

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Madeline Stone writes data-backed content for PrettyDamnQuick. She previously wrote about the e-commerce industry as a longtime reporter at Business Insider. ‍

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