According to a new research report published by Tidio titled AI in E-Commerce in 2026: The New Shopping Funnel, a significant gap exists between consumer reliance on AI for product research and the ability of standard attribution models to capture this influence. The report draws on more than 60 sources including McKinsey, Contentsquare, Similarweb, and Bain. McKinsey data indicates half of consumers now use AI as their primary or preferred source for product research, while Contentsquare's analysis of actual retail web traffic shows AI-referred sessions at only 0.2% of total visits. Both figures are accurate, and the discrepancy forms the core finding of the report: AI is shaping purchase decisions at a scale that current measurement systems are structurally unable to capture.
The mechanism creating this gap is straightforward. A consumer asks an AI assistant for product recommendations, receives a shortlist, and then navigates directly to a recommended brand via a new browser tab or a branded search. The resulting web session registers as direct or organic traffic, leaving the AI that initiated the journey with no attribution. The report terms this commercially real but analytically invisible influence "dark AI." Conversion data from the small fraction of sessions that do get tagged as AI-referred suggests the undercounting is significant. Similarweb's analysis of U.S. retail data finds ChatGPT-referred sessions convert at 11.4%, the highest rate of any measured channel, ahead of direct traffic at 10.2%, paid search at 9.3%, and organic search at 5.3%. This conversion premium implies tagged AI referrals represent a high-intent fraction of a much larger pool of AI-influenced journeys.
The attribution gap is widening, presenting a growing challenge for marketers. TollBit's analysis of AI bot behavior across publisher sites found click-through rates from AI applications dropped nearly threefold over 2025, from 0.8% in the second quarter to 0.27% by year-end, as AI platforms consume more content while generating proportionally fewer outbound clicks. Tytus Gołas, Founder and CEO of Tidio, stated, "Brands making budget decisions based on last-click attribution are optimizing for a measurement system that cannot see what is actually driving demand." He noted that the inputs determining AI visibility—such as feed completeness, structured data, and review coverage—often live across multiple organizational teams with no clear ownership because the return remains invisible.
The financial stakes are substantial. McKinsey projects $750 billion in U.S. revenue will flow through AI-powered search by 2028, with brands that fail to prepare risking 20 to 50 percent of their traditional search traffic. Morgan Stanley estimates AI agents will influence between $190 billion and $385 billion in U.S. e-commerce spending by 2030. The report also documents the emerging protocol infrastructure designed to formalize AI's role in transactions. Initiatives like Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol are creating standardized rails for AI agents to complete purchases on behalf of consumers. Consumer readiness for this shift is building rapidly; Omnisend's longitudinal research found reluctance to allow AI to complete transactions dropped from 66% to 32% between February and July 2025. The full report is available for download at https://www.getlyro.ai/reports/ai-in-ecommerce.
