• 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. 

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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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. 

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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