The new data shows ChatGPT’s growing influence as a referrer on e-commerce sites, as well as how small its slice of that market currently is.
According to a new analysis from mobile app intelligence provider ApptopiaChatGPT referrals to retail mobile apps grew 28% year-over-year during the Black Friday holiday shopping weekend, from Thanksgiving Thursday through Sunday.
However, the use of ChatGPT may not benefit smaller retailers as much as it helps further consolidate e-commerce giants Amazon and Walmart. This year, Amazon’s share of ChatGPT referrals rose to 54%, up from 40.5% in 2024. Walmart’s share, meanwhile, rose from 2.7% last year to 14.9% now.
The data was collected by Apptopia’s US panel, which is based on observed consumer activity on mobile devices. As it is not first-party data, its figures are estimates only. For this analysis, the company defined a referral session as a retail mobile app session that was directly followed (within 30 seconds) by a ChatGPT session.
Despite the big jump from 2024, consumer use of AI chatbots to find e-commerce deals is still a small slice of the overall referral market, Apptopia noted. Last year, ChatGPT referrals to e-commerce apps were only 0.64% of all ChatGPT sessions on Black Friday, and that percentage only increased to 0.82% this year.
In this case, a referral period was any time ChatGPT either gave the researcher a shopping idea or the user clicked a link directly from the chat session that took them to the retail app.
Apptopia isn’t the only company investigating how artificial intelligence is impacting e-commerce during the busy holiday shopping season. Adobe also reported this week that AI-powered traffic to US retail sites (as measured by shoppers who clicked on a link) increased 805% year-over-year on Black Friday, and those landed on a retail site by an AI chatbot were 38% more likely to make a purchase.
In addition, Adobe said that AI traffic to US retail sites on Cyber Monday increased by 670%. In the holiday shopping season so far (November 1 to December 1), AI traffic is up 760%, he noted.
