AI Just Became the New Gatekeeper of Black Friday
If you thought Black Friday was still driven by search results, ad blitzes, and endless email promos, think again. According to Bluefish’s inaugural Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2025 AI Shopping Trends Report, shoppers increasingly turned to generative AI to decide where to shop, what to buy, and which brands to trust.
The report—powered by analysis of millions of AI-generated answers—offers one of the first detailed looks at how large language models influenced holiday shopping decisions at scale. And if you’re a CMO, the data is a flashing sign: AI is no longer downstream from consumer intent; it’s becoming the first stop.
Who Won the AI Visibility War?
In this emerging landscape, not all retailers were equal. Some dominated AI recommendations across categories, while others appeared inconsistently depending on audience, prompt phrasing, or even the specific AI system used.
The biggest standout: Best Buy, which owned the “best deal” narrative across major electronics segments including computers, TVs, phones, and home appliances.
Trailing behind:
- Walmart and Amazon, strong competitors but less consistently recommended than Best Buy in high-intent queries.
- Nordstrom, the top clothing callout in AI answers, followed by Target and Macy’s.
- DSW, which led AI visibility for shoes, ahead of Nordstrom and Foot Locker.
The takeaway is blunt: AI assistants are already shaping which retailers consumers consider trustworthy before they ever hit a website or ad.
The Rise of AI Commerce—Fragmented and Hyper Personalized
Bluefish’s findings highlight a shift that retailers have only begun to understand. AI answers aren’t uniform. Age, budget, and other demographic signals dramatically change which brands surface in generative results.
This fragmentation means CMOs can no longer rely on aggregate brand visibility metrics. AI influence must now be managed audience by audience—mirroring the shift from keyword targeting to behavioral targeting a decade ago, but on steroids.
Measuring Influence in the AI Era
To translate this chaos into something actionable, Bluefish used its Impact & Influence Analytics, built to uncover which content sources quietly shaped AI outputs:
- Impact Score: Measures how closely a cited webpage aligns with AI-generated answers. In practice, it shows which pages actually power generative responses, not just which ones rank in traditional search.
- Influence Rank: Aggregates performance across thousands of AI interactions to reveal which sites drove consistent visibility for each brand.
These tools signal an inflection point: as generative answers replace search snippets, the optimization playbook must shift from traditional SEO to generative ranking optimization—where the goal is influencing training signals, cited sources, and AI answer patterns.
The Broader Implication
Bluefish’s report confirms what many in retail suspected but lacked the data to prove: generative AI is already influencing billions in holiday spending long before consumers click “add to cart.”
Brands that win AI visibility will be the ones shoppers encounter first, trust most, and compare against competitors. Meanwhile, those relying solely on search rankings or paid placements may find themselves invisible in the very moments that matter most.
As CEO Alex Sherman puts it, “The 2025 holiday season has cemented AI as the new front door to product discovery.” The brands that get their content, credibility signals, and generative influence right will be the ones standing closest to that door when shoppers walk in.
