Ulta, Best Buy and Adidas dominate AI holiday shopping mentions

Profound, a marketing platform that helps brands create AI-optimized content, released a Black Friday Index, a leaderboard tracking which brands and retailers ChatGPT seems to be favoring the most. 

According to Profound, the Black Friday Index highlights the 10 most visible brands — that is, the brands appearing most frequently in shopping-related prompts fed to ChatGPT — in a variety of categories like electronics, beauty and toys.

Each brand is given a visibility score based on how frequently it appeared in total relevant queries from Nov. 25 to Dec. 1. In the appliances category, for example, the top three most visible brands are Walmart, Best Buy and Home Depot, with visibility scores of 74.1%, 69.3% and 50.3% respectively.

In other categories, the results are a bit more fragmented. In shoes, for example, the most visible brand is Adidas, appearing in 50.2% of relevant prompts, according to Profound. The next most visible brands are Walmart, Nike and Skechers, with visibility scores of 35.6%, 35.3% and 26% respectively. 

Profound’s Black Friday Index also shows the most visible products in each category. In beauty, ChatGPT seemed to serve up a lot of suggestions for kits — Kiehl’s hydration gift set and Peach & Lily’s glass skin discovery kit were the first and second most visible products in the category. 

Profound says it works with third-party vendors to source the data. “We have a large data set of real user conversations with AI platforms,” said Ralfi Berk, product manager at Profound. “By looking at the real commercial conversations people are having with AI and filtering out the relevant ones for shopping, … we are able to understand the types of questions people actually ask.” And that, in turn, sheds light on which brands or products show up most frequently.

Berk said that in the week leading up to Black Friday, there were a lot of queries around whether or not a brand or retailer was going to have a Black Friday deal. So, at least for the Black Friday Index, a company’s visibility may have been partially determined by how much content was available about its Black Friday deals.

Prompts related to the beauty category, for example, surfaced a ton of mentions for Ulta and Sephora — but there was a wide delta between the two. Ulta showed up in 85.9% of relevant results, while Sephora showed up in 45% of answers. “We have seen Ulta coming up quite a lot, way ahead of the competition. I think they did a really good job creating content around their Black Friday deals ahead of time,” Berk said. 

Interestingly, Amazon also showed up frequently in results, even though it has blocked ChatGPT from scraping its site. For example, in the electronics category, Amazon was the most visible brand. 

Berk said Amazon will still appear in answers as a place to get Black Friday deals, even though ChatGPT won’t serve up Amazon product links.

For brands both big and small, sussing out just how much sales and traffic AI engines can drive will be a big focus during Cyber Week post-mortems. This is the first holiday season that OpenAI’s Instant Checkout was up and running, allowing people to buy some products directly within ChatGPT. Target also launched a new shopping app within ChatGPT in beta just in time for Black Friday. 

“There was certainly a lot of conversation more broadly around AI and AI platforms,” said Billy May, CEO of Brooklinen. “We saw a lot of interest in it.” But ultimately, he said, “it’s still a small percent of total traffic.”

When Chip Malt, co-founder and CEO of the cookware brand Made In, spoke to Modern Retail on Monday, he was in the process of figuring out just how much traffic ChatGPT drove for his brand this Cyber Week. Malt said that before Cyber Week, Made In was seeing about 100 sessions per day from ChatGPT. During Cyber Week, that increased 4.5x, and at one point, Made In was seeing about 5,000 sessions per day from ChatGPT. 

“Click-through from ChatGPT skyrocketed in conjunction with our traffic overall, so clearly people are scaling and starting research there.” But because early research has shown that few people click directly on links within ChatGPT, “it’s hard to figure out how many people are researching on LLMs and then coming directly to our site.” 

Berk from Profound said he’s really excited to see how the data evolves as answer engines add more functionality around shopping. In addition to Instant Checkout, ChatGPT this year also released a tool called Shopping Research, designed for more in-depth product comparisons. 

Ultimately, what these AI platforms do, according to Berk, is “really condense the whole shopping journey in one.” As ChatGPT adds more checkout functionalities, it will be a place for shoppers to discover, compare and buy products all in one place. 

“It is really important for brands to be aware of that and start from the very early stage of the funnel all the way to when there’s just informational intent, and create content around that so that their brands show up in all of these conversations end to end,” he said.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct Ralfi Berk’s title.