New data shows ChatGPT’s growing influence as a referrer to e-commerce websites, but also how small its slice of this market is currently.
According to a new analysis by mobile app insights provider Apptopia, ChatGPT referrals to retailer mobile apps increased 28% year-over-year over the Black Friday holiday shopping weekend, running from Thanksgiving Day on Thursday through Sunday.
However, the use of ChatGPT may not be benefiting smaller retailers as much as it’s helping to further entrench the e-commerce giants, Amazon and Walmart. This year, Amazon’s share of ChatGPT referrals grew to 54%, up from 40.5% in 2024. Walmart’s share, meanwhile, increased from 2.7% last year to now 14.9%.
The data was collected by Apptopia’s U.S. panel, which is based on observed consumer activity on mobile devices. As it’s not first-party data, its figures are only estimates. For this analysis, the firm defined a referral session as a retail mobile app session that directly followed (within 30 seconds) a ChatGPT session.
Despite the big jump from 2024, consumers’ use of AI chatbots to find e-commerce deals is still a small sliver of the overall referral market, Apptopia noted. Last year, ChatGPT’s referrals to e-commerce apps were only 0.64% of all ChatGPT sessions on Black Friday, and that figure only grew to 0.82% this year.
In this case, a referral session was anytime ChatGPT either gave the searcher a shopping idea or the user clicked a link directly from their chat session that brought them to the retail app.
Apptopia isn’t the only firm digging into how AI is impacting e-commerce during the busy holiday shopping season. Adobe also reported this week that AI traffic to U.S. retail sites (measured by shoppers clicking on a link) increased by 805% year-over-year on Black Friday, and those who landed on a retail site from an AI chatbot were 38% more likely to make a purchase.
In addition, Adobe said that AI traffic to U.S. retail sites on Cyber Monday increased by 670%. In the holiday shopping season so far (Nov. 1 to Dec. 1), AI traffic is up 760%, it noted.
