AI vehicles for US retailers rose 393% in Q1, and it’s also boosting their revenue

As of March, AI traffic on US retail websites increased by 269% over the past 12 months, continuing the holiday shopping season when AI traffic increased by 693%, according to data released Thursday by Adobe.

And in the first three months of 2026, the number of AI traffic increased by 393% compared to the previous year, as more consumers use AI assistants for online shopping.

The change in traffic sources is not the only one. AI visitors are improving, working at a higher rate, spending more time on the site, and driving more money per visit, data shows, often changing what happened a year ago, when loyal customers were more important to retailers.

Adobe Insights is based on its analysis of online activity, through its Adobe Analytics division, which tracks more than 1 trillion visits to US retail websites. The analysis also relied on a survey of more than 5,000 US consumers regarding the use of AI in shopping, as well as the company’s new AI Content Visibility Checker tool, designed to test retail websites for accessibility by LLMs.

In Adobe’s survey, 39% of people said they used AI when shopping online, and 85% said it helped them. This result is probably due to the way AI helps people to narrow things down to find what they want, and eliminate them altogether. In addition, 66% of respondents said they now believe that AI tools provide accurate results when shopping.

Unlike publishers, that AI is causing the decline of human dispatchersmarketers are encouraged to make their websites AI-friendly.

Adobe’s data found that AI traffic converted 42% to better than existing, retired customers in March 2026, setting a new record. In particular, I am changing what was reported in another article a year ago: In March 2025, the number of AI traffic changed 38% to be worse than that of ordinary people.

Additionally, Adobe found that when a customer arrives at a store through an AI source, their engagement rate is 12% higher than those who used a non-AI source. Consumers are also spending more time on site (48% longer) and browsing more pages (13% more pages per visit), which shows.

In terms of the top line, AI-driven revenue per trip (RPV) was 37% higher than non-AI vehicles as of March. 12 months ago, human traffic was always 128% better than AI.

However, not all websites are ready for AI, Adobe warned. It found that nearly a quarter of the content on the seller’s homepage is not LLM-qualified, as well as the content on the group’s website. Websites of all kinds fare the worst: about 34% of websites cannot be properly accessed by AI.

The company suggests that marketers work to make their sites more accessible to LLMs if they want to remain popular with online shoppers moving forward.