The evidence · what is changing today

Agentic Trends

Agentic commerce is not a forecast — it is already emerging. Three dashboards on shopping influence, the discovery shift, and adoption.

~900MChatGPT weekly users (Feb 2026)
+304%AI-driven retail referrals in 2025
~68%Google searches ending with zero clicks (2026)
-33%publisher search traffic, year to Nov 2025

Graph 1 · Share of shopping journeys using AI

Consumers using GenAI in the shopping journey.

Sources: Capital One Shopping; Stord, State of AI in E-Commerce 2026 (2026 figure is stated intent).

Graph 2 · The discovery shift

AI referrals vs traditional search, indexed to Jan 2025 = 100.

Sources: Euromonitor (AI referrals +304% in 2025); reporting on publisher search traffic -33% to Nov 2025; SparkToro (zero-click).

Graph 3 · AI adoption growth

2023 to present. Claude's 2026 surge is monthly website visits, not unique users, so it runs higher than a strict active-user count — but the growth is real and Similarweb-verified.

ChatGPT: weekly active users (OpenAI / Demandsage). Gemini: monthly active users (Google). Claude: monthly website visits to claude.ai (Similarweb) — up more than 5x year-over-year to 952.6M in May 2026. Perplexity omitted: its visits peaked at 240M (Nov 2025) and have since plateaued/declined to 138–210M, the opposite of the other three lines.

What the behaviour looks like

Two fronts are moving at once.

Consumer behaviour

  • Growth in ChatGPT usage
  • Growth in Perplexity
  • AI-assisted search
  • AI-generated recommendations
  • Shopping through AI assistants
  • Zero-click behaviour
  • Declining traditional search traffic

Enterprise behaviour

  • AI procurement agents
  • Customer service agents
  • Personal AI assistants

Gartner forecasts AI agents intermediating $15T of B2B purchasing by 2028 — the enterprise side is moving too.