AI Traffic Outperforms Paid Search for US Retailers, Adobe Says

Artificial intelligence (AI) traffic to U.S. retail websites is now converting better than non-AI traffic such as paid search and email marketing, Adobe said Thursday (April 16).

In March, AI traffic converted 42% better than non-AI traffic, marking a “major reversal” from a year earlier, when AI traffic converted 38% worse, Vivek Pandya, director of Adobe Digital Insights, said in a Thursday blog post.

“Rising consumer trust has played a factor, with Adobe’s survey showing that 66% of respondents believe AI tools provide accurate results,” Pandya said. “This is giving shoppers confidence and driving more transaction activity.”

Conversion is a measure of visits to a website that result in purchases, according to the post.

Two related metrics are also higher for AI traffic. Adobe found that in March, individuals who landed on a retail site from an AI source spent 48% more time on the website and browsed 13% more pages than those who landed from a non-AI source.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “How AI Becomes the Place Consumers Start Everything,” which was published in December 2025, found that dedicated AI environments are beginning to replace traditional discovery.

“Winning attention increasingly depends on whether a brand’s offers, policies and product truths can be interpreted and recommended inside conversational environments,” the report said.

Adobe also announced in its Thursday blog post that the amount of traffic from AI sources to U.S. retail sites saw year-over-year growth of 269% in March and 393% in the three months from January through March.

The company found that 39% of consumers said they have used AI for online shopping and that 85% of those consumers said the technology improved their shopping experience.

“These figures highlight the durable value that AI is delivering in the eCommerce space, shortening the time it takes for consumers to find what they need or locate relevant discounts,” Pandya said in the post.

Adobe also released new data in the post showing that 66% of the individual product pages on retail websites can be read by large language models (LLMs), meaning that the other 34% of sites have not been optimized for LLMs.

“Retailers have thousands of SKUs, and our data shows that much of the content is currently invisible to LLMs,” Pandya said in the post.

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