Bluefish AI
Black Friday Market Insights Report

Bluefish AI
Black Friday Market Insights Report

Bluefish AI
Black Friday Market Insights Report

What Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2025 Reveal about AI Shopping and Why AI Commerce Belongs in Every CMO’s Playbook

december 2025

Allison Gaffney with OpenAI

This year marks a historic turning point: Black Friday 2025 is the first major shopping event where AI-powered platforms are guiding a broad base of consumers in discovery, research, and purchase decisions.

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.

This 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.

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.

The Bluefish Methodology

Bluefish analyzes millions of interactions across AI platforms to determine how to best position your brand & take action to drive growth within AI Commerce.

Measure and analyze

Optimize

Action for growth

Measure and analyze

Optimize

Action for growth

Measure and analyze

Optimize

Action for growth

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Who won Black Friday across AI Commerce?

Bluefish analyzed millions of AI shopping data points over Black Friday and Cyber Monday; these brands & retailers had the most overall visibility.

When looking across major Black Friday categories, we see that Best Buy leads all retailers across 4 of the most important categories: Computers, Home Appliances, Phones and TVs. Apple’s strong presence in Phones underscores the value of aligning brand visibility with consumer expectations in key tech categories. Nike’s leadership in Shoes and Samsung’s leadership in TVs mirror overall awareness trends within each category.

Top Retailers: Best Buy dominates AI Black Friday searches by owning the ‘best deal’ story across categories

Key takeaway

By clearly positioning itself as the place to find the best Black Friday deals across categories, Best Buy became the retailer AI recommended most often.

Key takeaway

By clearly positioning itself as the place to find the best Black Friday deals across categories, Best Buy became the retailer AI recommended most often.

Key takeaway

By clearly positioning itself as the place to find the best Black Friday deals across categories, Best Buy became the retailer AI recommended most often.

Exhibit 1: Retailers Most Visible in top AI Search categories during Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Top Brands: The most visible brands leveraged their high awareness across demographics

Key takeaway

In AI Commerce, the real winners were brands that showed up consistently across many different audiences, not just within a single segment.

Key takeaway

In AI Commerce, the real winners were brands that showed up consistently across many different audiences, not just within a single segment.

Key takeaway

In AI Commerce, the real winners were brands that showed up consistently across many different audiences, not just within a single segment.

Exhibit 2: Brands Most Visible in top AI Search categories during Black Friday & Cyber Monday

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Get AI visibility for your brand
Get AI visibility for your brand

AI Commerce is becoming hyper personalized

Different consumer demographics who ask the same question will get very different answers from AI Platforms.

AI commerce is becoming hyper personalized, which means when different consumers ask the same question they see entirely different brands. Black Friday was no exception as differences in age and budget drove dramatically different visibility results. This fragmentation shows that there is no single winner in any category; leadership depends on who is asking and what their budget looks like. Marketers that work with Bluefish understand the need to design audience-specific GEO strategies rather than relying on one generic brand position.

AI-driven shopping highlights generational divides in top brand recommendations

Key takeaway

Because AI talks to each consumer differently, brands must activate granular, segment‑level insights to win AI Commerce at scale.

Key takeaway

Because AI talks to each consumer differently, brands must activate granular, segment‑level insights to win AI Commerce at scale.

Key takeaway

Because AI talks to each consumer differently, brands must activate granular, segment‑level insights to win AI Commerce at scale.

Exhibit 3: Most Visible Brands within AI Commerce across Baby Boomers & Gen Z

AI Commerce surfaces distinct brands for premium and budget shoppers in every major category

Key takeaway

AI steers big‑budget and value shoppers to different brands, so marketers need content that speaks to both premium and budget choices in every category.

Key takeaway

AI steers big‑budget and value shoppers to different brands, so marketers need content that speaks to both premium and budget choices in every category.

Key takeaway

AI steers big‑budget and value shoppers to different brands, so marketers need content that speaks to both premium and budget choices in every category.

Exhibit 4: Most Visible Brands within AI Commerce for people with High & Low budgets

Take control of your AI narrative
Take control of your AI narrative
Take control of your AI narrative

Putting Bluefish's new Impact & Influence Metrics to Work

New Bluefish metrics reveal which sources actually shaped AI Black Friday recommendations, beyond raw citation counts.

Bluefish has recently introduced a new measurement framework to explain not just where brands are cited in AI answers, but which sources actually shape AI responses. Impact Score measures how closely content from a cited page aligns with AI response text, revealing which sources truly shaped the answer. Influence Rank aggregates impact across thousands of responses to identify sources that most consistently drive your AI representation.

These metrics are applied to millions of data points to reveal which publishers, retailers, review sites, and social platforms really move AI recommendations. The analysis shows that some domains, like CNET, show low citation frequency, yet have significant impact on the answers themselves. These proprietary metrics allow marketers to see which sources AI is genuinely learning from when it answers questions from consumers, and to focus efforts on the outlets that will most directly change how AI platforms describe their brands.

Beyond raw citation counts, a core group of sources exerts outsized influence over how AI describes brands

Exhibit 5: Top Scoring AI Source Influencers

Find out how your brand is measuring
Find out how your brand is measuring
Find out how your brand is measuring

Black Friday 2025 and the new AI Marketing mandate

AI is now a primary route to purchase and Bluefish is here to help you build AI Commerce into your core marketing toolkit.

Black Friday 2025 is a clear inflection point. For the first time at scale, consumers turned to AI assistants to decide what to buy and where to buy it. Online spending reached record levels, and a rapidly growing share of that demand flowed through AI shopping journeys rather than traditional search or direct site visits. At the same time, this report shows that what AI recommends is not uniform.

Against this backdrop, AI visibility and GEO cannot be treated as experimental side projects. They need to sit alongside brand, performance, and CRM as a core pillar of the marketing mix.

Rather than treating AI Commerce as a black box, Bluefish analyzes and takes action to drive growth for your brand. This means that Bluefish can put your brand back in the drivers seat within AI Commerce.

The main takeaway is that perception, as constructed by AI, is rapidly becoming the primary interface between consumers and brands. That perception is not fixed. It can be understood, shaped, and actioned by teams that have the right data and tools. Marketers who embrace this reality will not just adapt to the future of AI commerce. They will help define it.

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