Decoding 4 AI holiday shopping shifts and how retail marketers can respond

In years past, holiday shopping was a frantic race of crowded stores, endless open tabs, and mounting decision fatigue.

But a profound shift is underway. Holiday shopping is becoming more deliberate. With AI-powered help at their fingertips, they no longer have to choose between making a smart decision and a fast one. Shoppers are taking their time, exploring more options, and buying with absolute confidence.

Here are the four key consumer behaviors defining this new landscape — and the simple, strategic moves your brand can make for a winning holiday marketing strategy.

1. Expanding options through research, questions, and discovery

The old, straight-line path to buying is gone, replaced by a continuous, open-ended cycle of discovery.

AI tools expand the journey, helping consumers explore deeply and discover new possibilities before they ever start narrowing down choices. The numbers tell the story: Online shoppers who use AI platforms or features in their purchase journey interact with or notice 12.1 touchpoints, on average, compared to only 4.2 for shoppers who did not use AI.¹

This exploration is highly natural, visual, and open ended: 75% of those who use AI on Google agree AI allows them to search more naturally, like asking highly specific questions or searching with a photo.² This discovery also extends to video: 85% of U.S. holiday shoppers using Google and YouTube say these tools help them find inspiration, discover, or expand ideas.³

Your move: Prepare for conversational and visual searches. Enrich your product data for the Shopping Graph with detailed descriptions and high-resolution images, so shoppers can easily discover your brand through camera searches, AI summaries, and real holiday questions.

2. Evaluating options using AI summaries to cut clutter, save time, and narrow options

While consumers love to explore, they also get overwhelmed by the sheer mental weight of managing endless open tabs, conflicting reviews, and fragmented information.

Google’s AI-powered Search features solve this by bringing clear summaries and answers directly into search results.

• Seventy-six percent of those who use AI on Google agree AI saves them time by quickly summarizing product details and reviews for them.⁴
• Sixty-nine percent of those who use AI on Google agree AI helps them cut through the clutter and avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many options.⁵

Ultimately, this efficiency translates directly into buying confidence, for example, 3 in 4 users say Google AI Mode and/or AI Overviews help them make faster and more confident decisions.⁶

Your move: Optimize for people, not bots. Google’s systems understand language just like humans do. Focus instead on a stellar web experience — fast speeds, mobile optimization, and clean pages. Build a great experience for humans, and the AI will naturally recommend it.

3. Validating information on Search and with YouTube creators

Even in an AI-powered world, trust must be earned. Shoppers consistently return to a trusted environment to verify facts before buying.

With consumers spreading their shopping across many different platforms, Google and YouTube serve as daily home bases. In fact, 86% of surveyed consumers use Google and/or YouTube daily, which is significantly higher than other online platforms.⁷

Even when consumers use other generative AI tools to research products, they rarely skip this step: 99% of those who go to ChatGPT to look into products or services consult with Google Search to help with purchase decisions.⁸ They turn to Google for trusted depth: 81% of U.S. holiday shoppers using Google’s generative AI Search say it is trustworthy, helps them feel confident, or helps understand a product before buying.⁹

To lock in choices, consumers turn to creators they trust, making YouTube an indispensable bridge.

According to a survey conducted by Kantar, 70% of surveyed viewers in the U.S. say that creator content on YouTube helps them research when making purchase decisions.¹⁰ Brands can capitalize on this attention. A meta analysis by Adelaide says that, in the U.S., YouTube ad placements rank No. 1 in attention versus ad placements on streaming, social, and linear TV.¹¹

Your move: Create a verification loop. Partner with YouTube creators so that when shoppers search your brand on Google to validate their choices, they find authentic reviews that prove your product’s value.

4. Enlisting AI for price- and deal-hunting before making the final decision

For the final click, shoppers want a fast, smooth finish. They use AI to check their homework, looking for coupons, checking inventory, and using virtual try-on features to visualize fit. This assistant-like help is a game changer, as 60% of those who use AI on Google agree AI helps them make the final decision, find the best deal, and check out faster.¹²

Showing up at this exact moment protects your entire marketing budget. During the Q4 holiday shopping period, brands that allocate more investment to Google Search typically see a 74% higher return on their total media budget, compared to brands that allocate more investment to paid social.¹³

When you show up for people who are actively looking to buy on Search, you make every other dollar you’ve spent on marketing work significantly harder.

Your move: Keep inventory updated and checkout fast. Ensure your prices and stock levels are updated in real time so AI assistants don’t bypass you. And offer easy payment options like Google Pay to prevent last-second cart drops.

Connect the dots for your holiday marketing strategy

Looked at together, these shifts in consumer behavior tell a clear story. People aren’t using AI to bypass the shopping journey. They are using AI to master it. Today’s consumers want to get it right. In fact, for 3 in 4 (76%) reported holiday purchases, U.S. shoppers rated making the best possible decision as being of high or medium importance.¹⁴

This is where your Q4 strategy comes in. By showing up at their trusted daily home bases with clear, verified answers, you make your entire holiday media spend work significantly harder, ensuring every dollar invested drives real, confident decisions.

To move from insights to action, download our comprehensive playbook, The retail marketers’ guide to the AI-powered holiday season. You’ll learn how to activate our Commerce 4 framework, a four-step strategic playbook designed to prepare your brand for peak shopping by structuring your product feeds for AI search, strengthening your first-party data, running agile campaign formats, and building an early agentic checkout infrastructure.