Ecommerce Trends: Which AI sources are sending referral traffic to online retailers?
AI referral traffic to ecommerce sites rose 62% YoY in July 2026, with AI-referred shoppers generating 53% more revenue per visit. ChatGPT lost ground as top AI traffic source (844 to 722 retailers), while Claude jumped from 1 to 15 retailers and Gemini doubled from 16 to 32.
This signals early-stage channel fragmentation where AI platforms become acquisition rivals to Google — brands that treat AI discoverability as an afterthought will face compressing organic traffic share as LLM-driven commerce matures.
Brands optimizing only for Google SEO are already missing a growing high-converting traffic segment — AI-referred visitors convert richer, not just more. Sellers with DTC sites should immediately add AI referral sources as a tracked channel segment in GA4 or Adobe Analytics to measure revenue-per-visit by source.
Operational Impact
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Bottom Line
AI referral traffic converts 53% richer — optimize for LLMs now or cede margin.
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AI referral traffic converts 53% richer — optimize for LLMs now or cede margin.
Key Stat / Trigger
AI-referred shoppers generated 53% more revenue per visit than other shoppers in July 2026
Focus on the operational implication, not just the headline.
Full Coverage
The list of online retailers getting the most help from artificial intelligence (AI) traffic sources in 2026 continues to shift — and as it does, the platforms playing the biggest roles in sending that traffic are evolving as well. In July alone, Adobe Analytics showed AI-associated referral traffic to ecommerce sites rising by 62% year over year.
In addition, Adobe observed shoppers referred by AI tools generated 53% more revenue per visit than other shoppers. Though the overall volume of these referrals has not yet overtaken referrals from traditional search engines, conversion is an area that holds potential to set AI traffic segments apart for merchants.
New findings based on AI Commerce Rankings data from Digital Commerce 360 and ReFiBuy offer a glimpse into which large language models (LLMs) account for their largest shares of AI traffic to online retailers from the Top 1000 Database. That market research tool ranks online retailers in North America by annual web sales.
Comparisons between traffic levels from Q1 and Q2 in 2026 highlighted renewed competition for OpenAI’s ChatGPT — particularly from Anthropic’s Claude, which just this week announced new Claude agents for ecommerce. What are the top AI referral traffic sources for online retailers?
Breaking down the changes among top AI traffic referral sources for online retailers in Q2, analysts at ReFiBuy spotted several key changes when assessing which platforms were sending the most traffic to specific merchants. “One of the things that moved, for example, is in Q1, 844 retailers had ChatGPT as No.
1,” said Scot Wingo, the founder and CEO at ReFiBuy. “That decreased to 722 [in Q2].” That shift occurred as other AI platforms achieved gains. “Replacing that was a combination of the folks behind,” he explained. “So, [Google] Gemini went from 16 — being the top for 16 retailers — to 32.”
Essentially, the number of retailers tracked in the AI Commerce Rankings that relied most on Gemini among AI traffic sources doubled in Q2 from Q1. Among those on the rise were Perplexity and Claude. Perplexity gained 12 more online retailers looking to it as their top AI traffic source.
Meanwhile, Claude proceeded on a trajectory to potentially challenge OpenAI and Google’s products. What Anthropic’s Claude is doing in agentic commerce “Only one retailer had Claude as their top source of traffic [in Q1], and now there’s 15,” said Wingo. “That’s a really big move.”
As Wingo pointed out, Anthropic implemented product cards for shoppable recommendations in Claude.
While Claude did not make early efforts in 2025, as both OpenAI and Google did, to integrate checkout (efforts that have largely been rethought, with agentic commerce experiences flowing through retailer-specific apps), Anthropic did experiment internally with an agentic marketplace in something it called Project Deal.
More recently, it announced an expanded partnership with Salesforce to create Claudeforce for Salesforce users. Then, it also announced its new digital blueprints for commerce-targeted agents. In the meantime, Claude’s rise among referral sources to retailers’ websites shows that its role is changing as those commerce-associated efforts advance.
“If that continues over eight quarters, they’re gonna be in the hunt for up there with Gemini and ChatGPT,” Wingo stated. Editor’s note: Subscribe to our retail newsletter to make sure you see each weekly edition of Ecommerce Trends. Do you rank in our databases? Submit your data and we’ll see where you fit in our next ranking update.
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In GA4, create a custom channel group filtering referrals from chat.openai.com, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, and perplexity.ai — if revenue-per-visit exceeds your organic search baseline, shift content budget toward AI-visible product descriptions and structured data.
In the next 30 days, audit your product pages for AI crawlability: ensure schema markup, clear product specs, and FAQ-style copy that LLMs can cite — Claude's new product cards and shoppable recommendations make structured content a direct traffic lever.
Original Source
This briefing is based on reporting from Digital Commerce 360. Use the original post for full primary-source context.
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