This holiday season, a lot of shoppers won’t start on Google or Amazon. They’ll ask an AI assistant: “What’s the best waterproof jacket under $150?” A few seconds later they’ll get a short list of products and a link to each store.
Whether your store is on that list, and whether the shopper buys when they arrive, depends on things you can still fix before Black Friday on 27 November. Here’s what’s changing, how AI assistants actually pick products, and a five-week plan you can start on Monday.
What the numbers say
Adobe, which tracks more than a trillion visits to US retail sites, expects online holiday spending of $275.1 billion between 1 November and 31 December, up 6.7% on last year. The more interesting line is about AI: Adobe expects traffic from AI services to US retail sites to rise 130% year over year.
Two details matter for store owners. First, Adobe counts AI traffic as shoppers clicking on a link from an AI chat or browser service to a store. So this isn’t about AI buying for people; it’s about AI sending people to you. Second, in an Adobe survey of 5,000 consumers, 77% of those who had used AI for shopping felt more confident in their purchase, and 69% said they were less likely to return it.
Keep it in proportion: 130% is growth, not share. Most of your Black Friday visitors will still arrive from search, email, social and ads. But AI traffic is growing quickly, and Adobe’s survey suggests the shoppers it brings buy with more confidence.
How an AI assistant chooses products
AI assistants don’t have a secret catalogue. They build their answers from information they can read: your product pages, the structured data on those pages, and product feeds that stores send to platforms like Google Merchant Center. If that information is missing, inconsistent or blocked, your products are much less likely to be suggested.
Google: structured data plus a feed
Google’s own documentation is clear about what helps most: “Providing both structured data on web pages and a Merchant Center feed maximizes your eligibility to experiences.” It also recommends including availability, shipping costs and your return policy.
The good news for WooCommerce stores is that WooCommerce already adds product structured data on its own, including price, stock status, images, SKU, ratings and reviews. Shipping costs aren’t part of what core WooCommerce adds, so they’re worth filling in through your SEO plugin or Merchant Center settings. For the feed, the official Google for WooCommerce plugin (used by more than 800,000 stores) syncs your products to Merchant Center and keeps prices and stock up to date.
ChatGPT: let the right crawler in
ChatGPT reads the web with its own crawlers, and this is where many stores trip up without knowing it. OpenAI’s crawler documentation explains that “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.” A different crawler, GPTBot, is used for training AI models.
So if someone blocked “AI bots” on your store last year to stop training, check what they actually blocked. Blocking GPTBot is a reasonable choice. Blocking OAI-SearchBot quietly removes you from ChatGPT’s shopping answers. OpenAI also accepts product feeds from merchants for discovery in ChatGPT, which is worth a look for larger catalogues.
AI assistants don’t buy for your customers. They send customers to you, already decided. Your store just has to be ready when they arrive.
Where stores lose AI shoppers
In our experience, most lost sales come from a handful of fixable problems:
- The wrong bots blocked in robots.txt, a security plugin or the host’s firewall.
- Prices and stock that don’t match between the product page, the feed and the cart. Assistants compare them, and so do shoppers.
- Thin product pages with one photo and a two-line description. An assistant can’t recommend what it can’t understand.
- Slow pages on phones. Adobe expects 57.4% of holiday spending online to happen on mobile, rising to 63% on Thanksgiving.
- A checkout that breaks under load, or that doesn’t offer the payment options people expect. Adobe forecasts $21.3 billion of Buy Now, Pay Later spending this season.
Your five-week plan
From today there are five weeks until Black Friday. That’s enough time to fix the important things calmly, as long as you start now and stop making big changes the week before.
- Week of 26 October: let the right bots in. Check robots.txt, your security plugin and your host’s firewall. Make sure Googlebot and OAI-SearchBot can reach your product pages.
- Week of 2 November: fix product data. Clear titles, full descriptions, several good images, accurate prices and stock, shipping costs and a visible return policy. Connect or check your Merchant Center feed.
- Week of 9 November: speed and mobile. Open your best-selling products on a phone, on mobile data, and buy something. Fix anything that’s slow or awkward.
- Week of 16 November: final changes. Update plugins, take full backups, and if you expect big traffic, ask your host about a load test. This is also a good moment to confirm your host has applied the October PHP security fix.
- Week of 23 November: freeze and watch. No new plugins, no redesigns. Watch orders, stock levels and payment errors, and keep someone on call.
For agencies with ecommerce clients
This is a good week to send each ecommerce client a short, practical note: what you’ll check, what you need from them (shipping rates, return policy, stock counts), and when changes will stop. Clients remember the agency that prepared them for their biggest week of the year.
If you’re short of hands, this is exactly the kind of work we take on for agencies: WooCommerce and ecommerce development, speed fixes, and care plans that cover the weeks when a store can’t afford to break. And if a client wants AI tools working inside their store, read how AI agents connect to WordPress and WooCommerce first.
What we’ve learned from store launches
Our team has built and looked after more than 50 WooCommerce stores, from small shops to migrations with thousands of products. A few lessons come up every holiday season.
Most “AI visibility” problems are really housekeeping problems. When a store is missing from AI shopping answers, the cause is rarely anything clever. It’s usually a robots.txt rule or security plugin setting that someone added long ago, product pages with a one-line description, or prices in the feed that no longer match the site.
The week before a sale is the worst time to update plugins. We schedule updates for the middle of November, test checkout on staging, and then freeze. If an update is needed in the final week, it should be a security fix, applied with a fresh backup and someone watching orders afterwards.
Test the real buying journey on a phone. Not a quick look at the homepage: find a product the way a customer would, add it to the cart, apply a coupon and pay. We regularly find problems this way that nobody notices on a desktop, from pop-ups that cover the checkout button to payment pages that load slowly on mobile data.
The bottom line
AI won’t replace your store this Black Friday. It will send you shoppers who already know what they want, and it will skip stores whose product information is missing, blocked or out of date. The fixes are ordinary ones: let the right crawlers in, make your product data complete and consistent, and make sure your store is fast and reliable on a phone.
You have five weeks. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on a client’s store before the rush, book a call and we’ll go through it together.
