Half of consumers use AI to research purchases. Less than 1% of retail web traffic is tagged as AI-referred. Both numbers are correct and the gap between them is becoming a serious strategic problem.
Ask fifty consumers how they decided what to buy last month, and roughly half will mention an AI tool. Check your analytics dashboard, and you’ll find AI drove less than 1% of your sessions. This isn’t a rounding error. It’s a structural flaw in how the industry measures one of the fastest-growing influences on purchase behavior — and it’s quietly distorting budget decisions across marketing, merchandising, and operations.
The disconnect is documented in new research published by Lyro, an AI-powered customer experience platform, drawing on 70 sources including McKinsey, Contentsquare, Similarweb, and first-party platform data. The report, AI in E-Commerce in 2026: The New Shopping Funnel, puts numbers on what practitioners have been sensing but couldn’t prove.
Here’s the mechanics of the problem: a shopper asks ChatGPT which running shoes to buy. ChatGPT names three brands. The shopper opens a new tab, searches one of those brands on Google, and converts. That sale registers as organic search. The AI that initiated the entire journey gets no credit. Multiply that pattern across millions of daily interactions and you have what the report calls “dark AI”: influence that is commercially real and analytically invisible.
The scale of the gap is striking. McKinsey finds that 50% of consumers now use AI as their primary or preferred information source for product research. Contentsquare’s analysis of actual retail web traffic puts AI-referred sessions at 0.2% of total visits. Meanwhile, the sessions that do get tagged as AI-referred convert at 11.4%, the highest rate of any channel, ahead of direct traffic (10.2%), paid search (9.3%), and organic search (5.3%), according to Similarweb. The most plausible explanation for that conversion premium isn’t that AI sends unusually motivated shoppers. It’s that measured AI referrals are a small, high-intent fraction of a much larger pool of AI-influenced journeys that never get attributed.
The attribution problem compounds at the infrastructure level. TollBit’s analysis of AI bot behavior finds that click-through rates from AI applications dropped nearly threefold over 2025, from 0.8% in Q2 to 0.27% by year-end. AI platforms are consulting more content and sending proportionally fewer visitors to source sites, meaning the gap between AI influence and AI attribution is widening, not narrowing.
“We are in a period where the most powerful new acquisition channel in a generation is being systematically undercounted,” said Tytus Gołas, Founder and CEO of Tidio, the company behind Lyro. “Brands making budget decisions on last-click attribution are optimizing for a measurement system that can’t see what’s actually driving demand. The inputs that determine AI visibility (feed completeness, structured data, review coverage) live across five different teams in most organizations, and nobody owns them because nobody can see the return.”
The financial stakes are large enough to make the measurement gap a board-level issue. McKinsey projects $750 billion in U.S. revenue will flow through AI-powered search by 2028, with brands that fail to prepare risking 20–50% of their traditional search traffic. Morgan Stanley estimates AI agents will influence $190–385 billion in U.S. e-commerce spending by 2030. ARK Invest puts the global ceiling at $9 trillion.
The report also charts the infrastructure being assembled to formalize AI’s role in transactions. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol are creating standardized rails for AI agents to complete purchases autonomously on behalf of users. Consumer readiness is moving faster than most projections anticipated: Omnisend’s longitudinal research found reluctance to allow AI to complete transactions dropped from 66% to 32% in just five months between February and July 2025.
The full report is available at https://www.getlyro.ai/reports/ai-in-ecommerce.
About Tidio Tidio is an AI-powered customer experience platform serving e-commerce businesses globally. Its Lyro AI agent automates customer service interactions while maintaining human escalation for complex cases. Learn more at https://www.tidio.com
