AI-Referred Shoppers Arrive Signed Out

Adobe's holiday forecast contains a number that has been repeated more than it has been read: AI traffic to US retail sites is expected to rise 130% year on year. The part in brackets is the part that matters. Adobe says the traffic is "measured by shoppers clicking on a link".

A click on a link is a landing on a page, and for a loyalty program the trouble starts with which page and in what state.

Published 11 November 2026; written 13 October 2026. This is the thinnest-evidenced page in our BFCM series, and it is written to stay inside what Adobe, Salesforce and Shopify have published. Adobe measures traffic and does not report orders. Where something is not known, the page says so.

What has been published

Adobe expects the increase to be sharpest on Thanksgiving, at 159% year on year, followed by Black Friday at 95% and Cyber Monday at 88%. The release gives no base for those percentages and no share of total visits, so a store cannot read off how much of its own traffic this represents.

Salesforce goes further and predicts that "20% of all 2026 holiday ecommerce traffic will originate from AI chat agents". The same sentence in its holiday predictions post says that traffic "will be a mix of consumer-facing bots handling live queries, autonomous agents executing backend tasks, and competitor scrapers". Part of that fifth is software reading your prices.

Shopify, for its part, has built for the channel. Its Spring '26 Edition states that "Shopify gets your products in AI channels automatically", and describes shoppers using AI agents who "can discover products across Shopify and approve purchases through Shop". A merchant did not choose to be listed there and does not choose which product an assistant links to.

The visit a click produces

Take the simplest case, which is the one Adobe is counting. Somebody asks an assistant for a recommendation, is shown a product, and taps through. The page that opens is a product page. The browser it opens in may be one the shopper has never used with your store, so there is no session and no login.

If that shopper is a member with 900 points and Gold status, your store has no way of knowing. She sees the public price and the public page.

Nearly everything a program does on the storefront waits for recognition. The balance is hers alone. A tier price applies once Shopify knows her tier. The redeem block in the cart has a state for guests and a different one for members; Joy's editor previews both, and offers a setting to hide the block from guests altogether, as the Redeem in Cart guide shows.

What can be shown to a stranger

Some surfaces are designed for the signed-out case, and they are the ones to check before the weekend.

Smile's guide to bonus points campaigns states that "Customers who aren't signed in see the highest amount they could earn, starting with 'up to'". Joy's Member exclusive deal sits on the product page and, for non-members, "encourages them to join the loyalty program to unlock these perks". Both put the program in front of somebody the store has not identified.

The other half is making sign-in short enough to do mid-purchase. Joy's widget offers Sign in with Shop on all plans, which, as Joy's guide to customer login in the widget describes, signs a Shop user in without reloading the page. Shopify is extending the same identity outward: the same Spring '26 Edition notes that developers can "add Shop sign-in to experiences built with Catalog API, so shoppers can connect their Shop account".

What is not known

Three things, and they are the important ones.

• How large this traffic is for a store of your size. Adobe publishes growth across US retail and Salesforce predicts a global share that includes bots.
• Whether these visits convert. Adobe's survey reports that 77% of respondents who had used AI for shopping felt more confident in their purchase. Confidence is what they were asked about.
• Whether a purchase approved through an agent earns points, accepts a reward code, or recognises a tier. Nothing read for this page documents it, and the secondary reports contradict one another.

The third is the one a loyalty team should chase with its vendor. If an order placed that way reaches Shopify as an ordinary order against a known customer, earning is probably unaffected and redemption is the gap. That is a guess, and it is labelled as one.

When to leave this alone

Open your analytics and filter sessions by referrer for the assistants your customers use. If the share is a fraction of a percent, this is not a November project. A growth rate of 130% on a very small base is still a small number, and your time before Black Friday has better uses.

One check that is worth ten minutes

• Open a private window and go straight to a product page by its URL, the way a link from an assistant would.
• Read the page top to bottom. Note the first place the loyalty program is mentioned, if it is.
• Add the product to the cart. Note what the redeem block shows a guest.
• Find the shortest route to signing in from where you are, and count the steps.

For how Joy itself is approaching agents on the merchant side, see Joy AI Agents; the loyalty mechanics for the weekend are in our BFCM loyalty strategies guide.

Back to the brackets

"Measured by shoppers clicking on a link" describes a person arriving at one page of your store with no history attached. Paste the URL of your best-selling product into a private window and read the page as she would.

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