On Black Friday, a glimpse at how AI shopping might impact restaurants

Black Friday online sales were up 9.1%, according to Adobe. | Photo: Shutterstock

Restaurants take note: Consumers have a new tool in their online shopping repertoire this holiday season.

On Black Friday, more Americans turned to AI to help them surf the web for deals. AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail websites surged 805% year over year, according to data from Adobe Analytics, as reported by Reuters over the weekend.

That contributed to a record $11.8 billion in online Black Friday sales, Adobe found, with $3 billion of online Black Friday sales sourced by AI, according to Salesforce, as reported by Forbes.

Apparently, Americans overwhelmed by the sea of offers on the big holiday shopping day turned to AI to help them scour the web for gift ideas and bargains.

It’s the latest big data point in the conversation about how AI might change how people shop online. Instead of the old-fashioned search bar, consumers can now use chatbots like ChatGPT and Amazon’s Rufus to help find what they’re looking for, while autonomous AI agents like OpenAI’s Operator can even make purchases on shoppers’ behalf.

More than 40% of consumers use AI tools to help with shopping, and about half of Gen Zers and millennials say they’d let AI take care of all of their holiday gift-buying to reduce stress, according to a Harris Poll survey conducted for Mastercard.

As has been the case with ecommerce in general, these trends could very well trickle down to restaurants, many of which are increasingly depending on digital channels for sales.

But the advent of AI-powered shopping still faces a lot of basic questions. Being easy to find on Google is one thing, but how can restaurants also make themselves known to AI programs searching for answers? And, beyond that, how might restaurants partner with services like ChatGPT to make ordering, payment and fulfillment more seamless? (We’ve explored some of those questions in more depth here, here and here.)

The Black Friday retail data, while not explicitly restaurant-related, adds a few points to the discussion that are worth noting. The first is this: Many consumers are clearly ready to trust AI to make important buying decisions. Not only were they more likely to use AI to search for products this year, but they were also quite willing to click “buy” on the things that AI recommended. 

According to Adobe, on Thanksgiving, shoppers using an AI service were 54% more likely to make a purchase than those from other sources. Salesforce, meanwhile, found that agentic AI sources in the U.S. had a 300% higher conversion rate. 

This could mean that AI is legitimately good at finding just what consumers are looking for, whether that be a good deal or a particular product. Or it could mean that consumers are simply content to outsource some of that decision fatigue and call it a day.

Either way, it leads into the second point, which is the suggestion that AI could be a revenue driver for businesses. It’s apparently better at making a sale. And it seems to be at least partially responsible for the 9.1% increase in Black Friday sales this year, growth that exceeded Adobe’s forecast of 8.3%. Tariffs were likely a part of that too. 

To be sure, the way consumers shop online on a tentpole day like Black Friday is not necessarily the same way they will decide where and what to eat on a daily basis. Restaurants may be an impulse buy, a treat or a way to satisfy a craving. How many consumers will turn to AI for help in those scenarios? So far, we don’t have a lot of data on that. But it’s definitely happening. 

“Some of our clients have customers finding them through ChatGPT,” said Angel Muyrong, associate director for Malou, an online marketing service for restaurants, during a webinar this month about AI search. “That means your next customers might not only come from Google Maps or OpenTable or Resy but also from an AI conversation instead.”

Google still accounts for about 9 out of every 10 online searches, Muyrong said, but AI-powered search is growing rapidly: The number of ChatGPT searches has multiplied by 25 over the past three years, she said. 

And, as was the case with the holiday shopping rush, consumers are more likely to buy something when it’s sourced by AI, including food from a restaurant. “What we’ve seen so far is that conversion rates are much higher because people truly believe that it’s the best recommendation for them,” Muyrong said.

During the webinar, Muyrong offered several tips for how restaurants can stand out to AI bots. A lot of it amounts to basic online hygiene: maintaining your Google Business profile, being present and consistent across third-party directories and encouraging customers to leave reviews. Being mentioned in news articles and on sites like Wikipedia and Reddit also helps build credibility. Your website should be refreshed regularly with new content, and chains should make sure they have a local page for each of their locations.

All of this is stuff restaurants should probably be doing anyway, because a strong online presence is almost as important as a clean and well-lit storefront these days. And if Black Friday’s AI surge was any indication, it’s only going to become more important going forward.