Bluefish AI


Holiday Report 2025

Bluefish AI


Holiday Report 2025

Bluefish AI


Holiday Report 2025

What Bluefish learned about AI Visibility and AI Commerce during this year’s game-changing Holiday Season

January 2026

Bluefish’s analysis of AI-native shopping journeys during December shows that paid media had little direct impact on AI answers this holiday season. This confirms a similar conclusion from other reports that show as much as 95% of AI citations come from non-paid media. AI assistants instead rewarded brands for the quality, clarity, and consistency of their presence in organic (owned and earned) sources. This matters because more than half of American shoppers report using AI in their holiday shopping process, making AI visibility a direct leading indicator of demand capture in the most critical sales window of the year. 

This learning changes the decades-old holiday playbook of leveraging paid media1 to maximize consumer reach, win share of voice, and translate impressions into sales. Last year alone, brands reportedly poured more than 40 billion dollars into Q4 advertising, and projections for 2025 were even higher. Yet in the emerging AI shopping channel, investment into traditional media had very little measurable impact on what consumers actually saw when they turned to AI to decide what to buy and where to buy it. 

According to Adobe Analytics, online spending surged to $11.8 billion, driven in part by an 805% year-over-year increase in AI traffic to retail sites. AI shopping assistants like ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Google AI Mode are becoming indispensable tools for shoppers navigating complex offers amidst rising prices.

This AI-driven shift creates a fragmented marketplace. Consumer brand visibility and retailer prominence now depend on how they perform across diverse AI platforms, each with distinct algorithms and demographic biases. Brands and retailers can no longer rely on traditional marketing or e-commerce tactics alone.

TThis report, leveraging Bluefish’s proprietary data, provides marketers with a clear, data-driven guide to the new rules of AI-powered commerce and shows how marketing organizations can take action to drive growth in key selling moments.

What did move the needle? 

During the 2025 holiday season, Bluefish saw that 1st-party (owned)2 and 3rd-party (earned)3 sources accounted for the vast majority of impact on AI responses. 

During the 2025 holiday season, Bluefish saw that 1st-party (owned)2 and 3rd-party (earned)3 sources accounted for the vast majority of impact on AI responses. 

The content that mattered most came from a familiar but often under-orchestrated mix of: 

  1. Brand sites and blogs, especially pages explicitly structured around “gift guides,” “holiday collections,” and “best under $100” lists. 

  2. Editorial coverage and reviews, including technology, lifestyle, and fashion publishers with domain authority in their categories.​ 

  3. Retailer and marketplace content, particularly category and curated pages that AI uses to validate availability and pricing. 

Bluefish’s Impact Score and Influence Rank metrics, originally introduced in the Black Friday report, reveal that a relatively small set of high-signal pages drove a disproportionate share of AI holiday recommendations. In multiple categories, a handful of authoritative gift guides and review roundups shaped how AI defined “best gifts” and “best deals under 100 dollars,” effectively functioning as the new upstream media placements for AI commerce. 

For marketers, this changes what “coverage” means. It is no longer enough to appear in as many articles as possible; the objective is to appear in the specific articles that AI models prioritize based on consumer demographics or occasion.  

From “Best Deals” to “Best Gifts” 

One of the clearest shifts from November’s Black Friday window to December’s holiday period was the evolution of the dominant narrative in AI answers.

One of the clearest shifts from November’s Black Friday window to December’s holiday period was the evolution of the dominant narrative in AI answers.

During Black Friday, AI assistants overwhelmingly prioritized a “best deals” storyline, focusing on discounts, doorbusters, and limited-time offers. As the calendar moved deeper into December, that narrative lost momentum: Bluefish observed that “best deals” content saw its impact on AI recommendations decline by more than 30% heading into Christmas.

In its place, a more enduring “best gifts” narrative emerged and gained influence as shoppers moved from deal-chasing to thoughtful gifting. AI systems increasingly surfaced: 

  1. “Best gifts” guides by audience (for him, for her, for teens, for parents, for co-workers). 

  2. Thematic guides such as “best luxury gifts,” “best tech gifts,” and “best beauty gifts,” often anchored by a clear point of view rather than a raw discount percentage. 

  3. Pragmatic guides built around price thresholds, particularly “best gifts under 100 dollars,” which saw impact scores climb as the month progressed. 

This transition reflects a deeper behavioral shift in AI commerce. Early in the season, shoppers use AI to exploit value: “What is the best Black Friday deal on a 65-inch TV?” Closer to Christmas, they use AI to reduce cognitive load: “What are gifts under 100 dollars for my dad who loves tech?” The brands that recognized and leaned into this pivot, from pure price to context-rich gifting, were the ones that maintained or increased visibility as Black Friday receded. 

Which Brands won? 

Against this backdrop, several brands emerged as clear winners in AI holiday visibility, each for different reasons but all following the same structural pattern: tight alignment between owned content, earned coverage, and the narratives AI prioritized. 

In cosmetics, Ulta distinguished itself with strong “best gift” messaging that was consistently reinforced across both owned and earned content. AI assistants frequently surfaced Ulta in gifting journeys that emphasized value, assortment, and discoverability. The brand’s success underscores how clearly labeled and well-structured gift content can convert into AI visibility even in crowded categories. 

In luxury, brands such as Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Ralph Lauren achieved significant visibility as AI emphasized gifting as an expression of taste and status rather than pure savings. These brands benefited from decades of accumulated cultural relevance, but their holiday performance was also supported by a dense fabric of curated gift guides, editorial lists, and high-intent reviews that positioned them as definitive answers for “best luxury gifts.”  

Across all of these segments, one pattern holds: the brands that won the 2025 holiday season in AI commerce were those that moved fastest to embrace the new paradigm, aligning content, partnerships, and measurement around how AI actually constructs answers rather than how traditional search results pages are assembled. 

Wrapping up 2025 and looking ahead

The 2025 holiday season is an inflection point. Major AI platforms, marketplaces, and social platforms quietly embedded AI shopping flows in the past few months. Forward-thinking CMOs rewired holiday planning around owned and earned content, treating visibility as a core KPI measured weekly alongside ROAS. 

Looking ahead to 2026, we believe that direct AI advertising will begin to formalize an even more complex reality. Early pilots suggest brands will be able to sponsor answers, secure preferred placement in AI recommendations, and test AI-native creative. Winning teams will treat this as its own performance lever, with clear targeting, creative, and measurement. 

At Bluefish, we are committed to ensuring our clients can leverage AI commerce as a growth driver for their brands, especially as the landscape continues to evolve. Our platform is built to support this shifting landscape, helping brands see how AI represents them, identifying the few sources that truly drive recommendations, and systematically improving the inputs that sit between consumers and their purchase decisions. 

Reach out below for your customized Holiday 2025 Brand Report.

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Footnote

  1. Paid media includes paid advertising across channels such as print, news and publishing, television, radio, direct mail, billboards, and social media. These channels are typically one-way forms of communication, where messages are delivered to audiences without direct interaction. 

  2. Owned and operated channels include the brand’s website, brand owned social media pages (not inclusive of user-generated content), retailer eCommerce sites, and Amazon product detail pages that the brands control. 

  3. Earned media includes unpaid, third-party coverage that a brand receives through editorial, journalism, or word-of-mouth rather than paid placement. This includes news articles, reviews, features, interviews, expert mentions, and “best of” lists, where the brand does not control whether or how it is covered.