Your Next Customer May Never Visit Your Website. An AI Will Have Already Picked Your Product (or Not).
Lena needs a gift for her father, who likes to cook but hates clutter. She’s a character we dreamed up.
She doesn’t open Google. She asks an AI assistant: “Gift under $80 for a dad who cooks, doesn’t want gadgets.”
It gives her three options with short reasons. She taps one, checks the price, and buys.
The brand never got a pageview. It also never saw her scroll past its competitors.
How big is this?
Salesforce’s State of Commerce report (4th edition, published July 28, 2026) says “use of agentic search as the first step in the shopping journey grew 200% year over year.”
Before you put that on a slide, here’s what the page doesn’t tell us.
It doesn’t define “agentic search” beyond shoppers starting with a question to an AI, in a chat assistant or on a retailer’s own site. It doesn’t give a baseline. It doesn’t say whether the number comes from survey answers or from behavior data. And it doesn’t state a measurement period beyond “year over year.”
A 200% increase from a small start can still be small. We’d read it as direction, not size.
Other figures from the same report are easier to interpret. Traffic referred from AI chats grew between 150% and 428% year over year in every quarter measured, while overall traffic grew in single to low double digits. The report drew on behavior data from more than 1.5 billion shoppers (Q1 2024 to Q1 2026), plus surveys of 3,450 commerce professionals and about 4,690 consumers. And 28% of commerce organizations use agentic AI today. Salesforce sells commerce software, so treat the framing with care.
What’s here now, and what’s prediction?
Here now: People ask AI assistants for product recommendations. Retailers add assistants to their own sites. Brands can submit product data feeds to some AI search platforms. Referral traffic from AI chats is growing from a small base.
Prediction: That assistants will complete purchases for most shoppers. That they will become the main discovery channel. Salesforce found that 86% of commerce leaders agree LLMs will be essential to product discovery within a year. That’s a belief, not an outcome.
Plan for the first group. Watch the second.
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