Holiday Shopping 2026 · August 2026 to January 2027
Which brands AI puts on the 2026 holiday shelf
Last updated 12 October 2026 · updated weekly on Monday through January 2027
AI-driven visits convert 42% higher and deliver 37% more revenue than the rest of your traffic. Adobe, mid-2026 So we track which brands the assistants actually put in front of shoppers — by persona, by market, every week through the season. Read the methodology →
Stories
AI Shopping Shelf Insights
🌍 Overall
One brand clears every border
Most brands are a local answer — strong in one market, thin in the next. On the fitness shelf one name sits near the top of all four, while the brand that leads two of them slides far down the shelf in the other two.
🇺🇸 United States: Lululemon 9.1%, HOKA 8.4%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: HOKA 7.2%, Sweaty Betty 5.5%
🇺🇸 Skincare
The shelf AI calls cheap and the shelf it calls dear are different brands
AI puts a price label on what it recommends, in its own words. In skincare the brands it calls inexpensive are the ones it puts first — and the brands it calls a splurge sit further down the same shelf.
💷 The brands AI calls cheap: CeraVe 80.5%, COSRX 96.0%
💎 The brands AI calls dear: SkinCeuticals 100.0%, Tatcha 81.5%
The shelves
Who leads each category in US
- Purina 18.4%
- Hill's 7.5%
- The Farmer's Dog 7.2%
- CeraVe 10.7%
- Vanicream 6.9%
- La Roche-Posay 6.7%
- Optimum Nutrition 8.3%
- Thorne 6.4% ▼4.4
- Nutricost 4.8%
- LEGO 16.6%
- Magna-Tiles 15.3%
- POP MART 8.4%
The products
Shelf-share = the share of shopper attention this exact product holds. Visibility = the share of answers that named it.
How to read this table
Price is a band, not one number: the cheapest price on the market, the brand’s own price in bold, and the dearest — sorted low to high. Where only one figure is known, only one is shown. A dash means no price we could verify, not a free product.
Follow the shopper
Know your shopper personas to win the AI Shopping Channel
We follow a panel of shopper personas through their whole journey — awareness to purchase — and watch which brands AI puts in front of each one. The story is the shift: who AI recommends to discover is rarely who it recommends to buy.
Unseeded only · US · October 2026.
How we measure
We ask the assistants the same real shopper questions each run, and record every brand each one recommends.
What that means in practice
Each run we ask ChatGPT and Google AI Mode the same set of questions, one persona and market at a time.
Shelf-share is the share of answers in a category that named a brand. The questions never name a brand, so a brand is on the shelf because the engine chose it.
We settle on the questions before each run, never after. A brand on the shelf is the assistant’s pick, not one we went looking for.
Read the full method — the shoppers, their journey, and the season →
Grow your Brand’s Revenue in the AI Shopping Channel
See which shoppers already find you on the shelf, and where you are missing.