AI Christmas shopping: is your business ready?

Yep, that’s just about how it’s going nowadays. In fact, going by Salesforce numbers, about one in eight in-store shoppers are calling upon AI to help with their festive gift-buying.

Across the pond, Adobe have predicted chatbot traffic to US retail sites will jump 130% over November and December. Shopify’s said 64% of UK shoppers will use AI for at least one bit of the yuletide haul. Essentially every vendor with a holiday report has a number of its own. The numbers are growing.

So, AI-assisted Christmas shopping is very much happening. The question, then, becomes: if a customer asks AI where to shop this Christmas, does it know your business exists?

Sadly, at the time of writing, there’s a good chance it doesn’t... but first:

Ofcom’s April 2026 research found that 54% of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini, up from 31% the year before, and among 16–24s it’s 79%.

Even people who never open a chatbot are reading Google’s AI summaries. More than half of non-users see them at least sometimes, now that they appear for about 80% of searches.

Adobe’s 130%-growth figure, though, has dipped since 2025, when it was 693%. In 2024, it was at 1,300%! The curve is starting to flatten.

And the numbers here in Britain are going the same way: Adobe’s UK data had AI referrals to retail sites up 26x in Xmas ‘24, then up just over 4x in ‘25!

But... 26× or 4× of what, exactly?

Similarweb have the answer: 0.4%. That’s the share of retail ecommerce visits that currently arrive via generative AI. Not 40%. Nought. Point. Four. A fast-growing trickle, then.

It is a decent trickle, though. Adobe found AI-referred shoppers converted 31% better than everyone else in Christmas 2025. Someone who’s asked a chatbot something and then clicked through has usually made their mind up already.

So, there’s some promise. Alas...

Our fave stat of the season comes courtesy of Ozone and OnePoll: only 8% of UK consumers say AI is a primary influence on what they’ll buy this Christmas, and a measly 4% say it’s the source they trust most.

Professional publisher content, though? 27%. Good ol’ gift guides are being read by 36%, rising to 44% for millennials.

Mintel say 44% of Brits find AI gift suggestions regularly inaccurate, and 56% think using AI makes gifting feel less thoughtful.

Forter, on the other hand, found that one in five would trust AI over their partner to pick their present. Which... hey, no judgement, but maybe ask Claude to sort out your love life...

Basically: we’re using AI to narrow things down and check prices, then deciding based on the sources we trusted before any of this started.

It’s a research assistant with a very good memory for reviews. It is not, whatever the press releases say, doing the buying.

Since the back end of 2025 we’ve been told AI will soon buy things for us. OpenAI launched “Instant Checkout” inside ChatGPT in September ‘25, to much fanfare, but by March 2026, they’d quietly refocused on product discovery, sending shoppers back to merchants’ own checkouts.

A Forrester analyst counted that only about 30 Shopify merchants were live in February 2026, against a promised million. Not far off, keep going, OpenAI!

So, for shoppers in Britain during Xmas 2026, very few people’s chatbots are doing the buying. They’re doing the suggesting.

The real kicker, though, is...

SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index (published January 2026) looked at more than 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands and found ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of brand locations, vs. a 35.9% appearance rate in Google’s local three-pack (that’s what we in The Biz™ call the map box with three businesses in it that sits at the top of most “near me” searches).

Gemini managed 11%, Perplexity 7.4%. Even if the brand’s a big’un, the branch on the high street is, as far as the AI’s concerned, but a rumour.

Independents have it worse. A March 2026 study by booteek tested 1,211 highly rated independent restaurants and bars across eight UK cities (Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bath, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Belfast; London wasn’t included) and found 85% never appeared when an AI was asked for a recommendation.

In the regional cities it was 97%, and in Liverpool not one of the 48 venues tested showed up.

These weren’t dodgy pubs, mind you... the study deliberately picked 4.0+ star venues with proper review histories.

AI assistants don’t wander the high street. They piece together “the known venues in [city]” from a handful of sources, and most businesses have never been set up for any of those signals.

For starters... they’re often American signals! BrightLocal’s August 2026 citation study found Yelp cropping up in 80% of ChatGPT’s local answers, and Yelp is a comparative ghost town over here, so UK answers lean on whatever’s left: Google Business Profile, Tripadvisor, OpenTable, and editorial “best of” lists.

Reviews are a volume game. Study after study found that once you’re above about 4.4 stars, your rating barely matters, but review count does: the floor is about several-hundred Google reviews, and the venues AI recommends tend to have thousands. Your 4.9 with 60 reviews is lovely! But... invisible.

Who writes the “best of” lists for your city? Because when Whitespark surveyed local-search experts in 2026, expert-curated lists came out as the single biggest AI visibility factor, and chains get written up in city guides far more often than the independent on the corner does.

Then there’s plain ol’ data hygiene: SOCi found only 68% of the contact details ChatGPT and Perplexity show for a business match their Google Business Profiles. Opening hours are all over the show.

And sometimes there’s simply nothing to read: a menu as a flattened PDF, a Facebook-only presence, or a location page that says “find us in Birmingham” and precious little else.

AI can read text from PDFs, images, and just about anything else, of course, but they’re not going to spend the extra compute doing so unless a user outright asks them to.

It’s nothing too wild. What gets a branch recommended by an AI is mostly what gets it found on Google Maps, done properly and done per location.

Treat every branch as its own entity: one Google Business Profile per site, fully filled in, with the same name, address, hours, and phone everywhere else that lists you.

Give each location a proper page, with festive menus, group sizes, dates, prices, and parking as actual text (structured data on top, and never, ever a PDF. Well, PDFs as downloads, sure, but not on-page embeds.).

Get the review flywheel turning now! Volume and recency, branch by branch, Google first.

If you’re in hospitality and you’re not live on OpenTable (or whichever platform ChatGPT can see), get that fixed yesterday.

Pitch the local press and the city guides for “best Christmas party venues in [town]”. A mention there shapes what AI says about you.

And ask the robots yourself! Type your own customers’ questions into ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Mode for every city you trade in, and jot down who shows up. That’s your competitor list for 2027.

Your customers are already asking AI where to shop, eat, and celebrate. Make sure your locations are part of the answer. Talk to Trapeze Media about your local visibility, the gaps holding you back, and where to focus before the Christmas rush.