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TL;DR: More than half of consumers had already started holiday shopping in October or earlier heading into last season, and this year is not slowing down. Retail, eCommerce, and product brands still control the largest share of holiday dollars, but AI is now a real factor in how those dollars get spent. Salesforce projects that one-fifth of all 2026 holiday eCommerce traffic will come from AI chat agents, and retailers running their own branded shopper agents saw meaningfully higher holiday sales growth last year than those without one. At the same time, consumers have almost no patience for AI that gets it wrong, and brands leaning on AI Overviews and zero-click search without adjusting their content strategy are watching real organic traffic disappear during the exact weeks it matters most. Every industry, not just retail, has a genuine holiday marketing play. The businesses that win this season are not the ones chasing every new channel. They are the ones layering new tactics on top of a foundation that already works.
Why I Am Writing This in September
I have run acquisition programs through more than twenty holiday seasons at this point, first in Philadelphia starting in 2001 and now here on the Space Coast since founding Brevard SEM in 2021. Every year, a client asks me sometime around the first week of November whether it is too late to build a real holiday campaign. Every year, the honest answer gets a little more uncomfortable to give.
The data backs that discomfort up. In the most recent National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights survey, 51.9 percent of adults said they planned to start holiday shopping in October or earlier, with 8.4 percent starting before September and another 7.9 percent starting in September itself. A separate Shopify-Gallup Holiday Shopper Pulse found that 41 percent of consumers intended to begin before November altogether. If your holiday marketing plan starts the week of Black Friday, you are not early. You are behind a meaningful share of your own customers.
That is why I am publishing this now, in late September, instead of waiting for the traditional kickoff. What follows is not a list of tactics pulled from a generic holiday marketing template. It is what I am seeing work across our own client base and the broader industry data as this season sets up, what has genuinely changed since AI entered the shopping journey, and where I think brands are about to lose real money if they are not paying attention.
What Still Works: The Tactics Carrying the Season
Before getting into what is different this year, it is worth being honest about what has not changed. A lot of holiday marketing advice treats every season as a total reset. It is not. The fundamentals that drove results in 2022, 2023, and 2024 are still driving results now, and any strategy that skips them to chase something newer is building on sand.
Email and SMS remain the highest-margin channels of the entire season. They cost almost nothing incrementally to send, they reach people who already opted in, and they are immune to the auction dynamics that push paid search and social costs up 40 to 80 percent during peak weeks. A segmented list, built and nurtured well before Black Friday, is still the single most reliable revenue lever a retailer has going into Cyber Week.
Early, layered promotions still win over a single Black Friday event. Adobe’s own data shows Black Friday growth outpacing Cyber Monday growth for two holiday seasons running now, as shoppers take advantage of deals that start well before the traditional weekend. A promotional calendar that opens in early or mid-November and escalates toward Cyber Week captures demand that a single-day event leaves on the table.
Mobile-first execution is no longer optional context. It is the majority of the season. Adobe Analytics found that 56.4 percent of all 2025 holiday online transactions happened on a phone, with Christmas Day itself reaching 66.5 percent mobile share. If your checkout flow, your ad creative, or your landing pages were designed and tested on desktop first, they are underperforming for the majority of your traffic without you necessarily seeing it in a top-line report.
And local presence still converts foot traffic that no amount of national ad spend replaces. For any business with a physical location, an accurate, actively managed Google Business Profile remains one of the highest-return, lowest-cost holiday investments available. We cover the mechanics of that in more depth in our local search and Google Business Profile work, and in a companion piece on how Brevard County retailers turned foot traffic into a real digital strategy.
What Is Different This Year
Layered on top of that foundation, a handful of things about this season are genuinely new, not just faster versions of what already existed.
The most significant is the arrival of AI as a real traffic and discovery channel, not a novelty. Salesforce’s 2026 Holiday Predictions report, drawn from more than 1.5 billion shopper signals, projects that AI chat agents, consumer-facing bots, autonomous agents handling backend tasks, and competitor scrapers powering algorithmic price matching, will account for roughly 20 percent of all 2026 holiday eCommerce traffic. Consumer reliance on an AI assistant as the first stop in a shopping journey grew 200 percent between May 2025 and May 2026, according to the same research. Half of shoppers now report using an AI assistant somewhere in their buying journey, and 74 percent say they trust the product recommendations it gives them.
Social commerce has moved from experimental to structural. eMarketer’s TikTok Shop data shows U.S. sales on the platform grew 108 percent year over year to reach 15.82 billion dollars in 2025, and the firm projects it will surpass 20 billion dollars in 2026. Salesforce separately predicts social commerce overall will grow roughly nine times faster than traditional eCommerce this holiday season. For a meaningful share of shoppers, particularly younger ones, product discovery and purchase decisions now start and finish inside a social feed rather than a search engine.
Buy now, pay later usage hit a new record last season, with Adobe reporting 20 billion dollars in BNPL-driven holiday spend, up 9.8 percent year over year, and Cyber Monday alone crossing the 1 billion dollar mark in BNPL purchases for the first time. And the channel mix has fragmented in a way that makes a single-channel strategy riskier than it used to be. Salesforce’s own Shopping Index found global digital traffic grew 18 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026 while order volume grew just 1 percent, alongside a cart abandonment rate of 82 percent. More traffic is arriving from more places, and less of it is converting on the first visit than it used to.
Retail, eCommerce, and Product Brands: The Center of Gravity
Every industry has a holiday marketing angle, and we will get to several of them. But retail, direct-to-consumer eCommerce, and product brands remain the center of the season, and this year the gap between the brands doing this well and the brands doing it poorly is widening faster than usual because of AI.
Where AI Is Genuinely Paying Off
The clearest evidence is Salesforce’s finding that retailers running their own branded AI shopper agents saw 59 percent higher holiday sales growth in 2025 than retailers without one, a 6.2 percent increase compared to 3.9 percent. Shoppers who interact with a brand’s own agent report real confidence gains from it: 41 percent say a brand-owned AI assistant answering their questions makes them “much more confident” in a purchase, to the point that it replaces the need to read reviews at all, and another 36 percent report being somewhat more confident. Salesforce predicts one in three eCommerce sites will have a site-specific shopper agent live by Cyber Week 2026.
The mechanism behind this is straightforward. A well-built brand agent answers a product question, a fit question, or an inventory question instantly, at the exact moment a shopper is deciding whether to convert or bounce. That is a genuine improvement over a static FAQ page or a support queue that answers the question three hours after the shopper has already bought from a competitor.
Where AI Is Quietly Costing Brands Real Money
The failure mode is just as real, and it comes in two distinct forms.
The first is a trust problem. Research from ACI Worldwide, conducted with YouGov among more than 2,000 UK adults, found that 60 percent of consumers would stop using an AI shopping agent entirely after a single mistake, and only 19 percent trust AI to make everyday purchasing decisions at all, compared to 55 percent who trust a human expert. A wrong price, a promo code that does not apply, or a product recommendation that misses the shopper’s actual need does not just lose that one sale. It can end the relationship with the agent, and by extension the brand, permanently. For a retailer that spent the fall building out a shopping assistant on thin, outdated, or inconsistent product data, that is not a hypothetical risk. It is the most likely outcome.
The second is a visibility problem, and it is arguably the more expensive one because most brands do not realize it is happening until the season is already over. Google search itself has shifted hard toward zero-click behavior. Ahrefs tracked click-through rate on the number one organic position for keywords that trigger an AI Overview and found it fell from 7.3 percent in March 2024 to 2.6 percent a year later to 1.6 percent by December 2025, a collapse of roughly 78 percent in under two years. SparkToro’s clickstream research puts the overall U.S. zero-click search rate at 68.01 percent in early 2026, up from 60.45 percent in 2024. Pew Research found that when an AI Overview appears on a results page, only 8 percent of users click through to a traditional result, compared to 15 percent when no AI Overview is present. A retailer running the same content and SEO strategy it ran in 2023, expecting the same organic traffic during Cyber Week that strategy used to deliver, is going to come up short, and the shortfall shows up as missed revenue with no obvious single cause to point to.
There is a third, quieter cost as well. As AI shopping agents mature, the platforms hosting them are starting to restrict outside access. Amazon and Shopify have both moved to limit what external AI agents can do inside their ecosystems, and Walmart has added guidelines preventing outside agents from completing checkout on its site. For brands that depend heavily on paid placement and keyword-based advertising inside those ecosystems, that shift threatens the attribution and shopper-behavior visibility those brands have relied on for years, pushing more of the real decision-making into a layer they cannot fully see or measure.
The through line across all three failure modes is the same. AI does not fail retailers randomly. It fails the ones whose underlying data, whether that is product feeds, content structure, or entity consistency across the web, was never built to be read by a machine in the first place. This is the exact problem we built generative engine optimization and our proprietary Marxi system to solve: making sure the structured, accurate, real-time information an AI agent needs to recommend you correctly is actually available to it, rather than finding out during Cyber Week that it was not.
Where That Leaves Paid and Organic Strategy
None of this means retail should abandon paid search or SEO. It means both need to be built for a buyer journey that increasingly starts inside an AI conversation rather than a search box. That includes structured product data and schema markup that an agent can parse without ambiguity, answer engine optimization aimed at being the source an AI cites rather than the link a human clicks, and disciplined paid search and performance marketing that still captures the shopper who is ready to buy right now. Conversion rate work matters more than ever too, given an 82 percent cart abandonment rate industry-wide; a fast, frictionless checkout tied to real conversion optimization work turns traffic that AI agents and social platforms are sending in record volume into actual revenue instead of an inflated bounce rate.
How the Decade Reshaped Holiday Shopping
I have watched this shift happen in real time, and it is worth putting in context. Go back to 2020, and the holiday season was mostly still an eCommerce story built on top of a pandemic-driven shift indoors. The following years saw that online base keep growing on its own momentum: Adobe recorded 240.8 billion dollars in online holiday spend for 2024, up 8.4 percent year over year, then 257.8 billion dollars for 2025, up 6.8 percent. Buy now, pay later went from a niche checkout option to a 20 billion dollar category. Social commerce went from an afterthought to a structural piece of the funnel, with TikTok Shop alone growing 407 percent in 2024 and another 108 percent in 2025. And generative AI went from a curiosity to an actual discovery channel: Adobe’s own data showed generative AI-referred traffic to retail sites up 1,950 percent on Cyber Monday 2024 compared to the year before, and AI-driven traffic on Black Friday 2025 was up another 805 percent year over year.
Every one of those shifts had the same shape. A new behavior started as a rounding error, compounded faster than most marketers expected, and became structural within two or three seasons. That pattern is the single most useful thing to understand about where holiday marketing goes from here, more useful than any individual prediction about a specific platform or technology.
Where This Goes by the End of the Decade
I will say plainly that this is my own read on where things are headed, not a data point I can cite. Based on the trajectory above, I expect agentic commerce to stop being a differentiator and become table stakes by 2028 or 2029, the same way a mobile-responsive site went from a competitive edge to a bare minimum requirement over the previous decade. Product feeds, structured data, and entity consistency will matter as much to a brand’s holiday revenue as its actual product photography does today. I expect the physical store to keep mattering, not less, but its role will keep shifting toward the finishing move in a mostly digital research and discovery process, which is already showing up in Salesforce’s estimate that 38 percent of holiday retail dollars now flow through hybrid sales that blend online research with an in-store purchase. And I expect a meaningful split to open up between brands that treat AI visibility as a real discipline with its own budget and expertise, and brands that keep bolting it onto an existing SEO or content team as an afterthought. The first group is going to compound an advantage every season. The second group is going to keep wondering, every November, why traffic that used to convert reliably has started to quietly disappear.
Holiday Marketing Beyond the Shopping Aisle
Retail gets most of the attention every holiday season, understandably, but it is not the only industry with real seasonal opportunity. The calendar actually matters for a handful of other categories we work in regularly, and each one has its own angle worth planning around.
Healthcare and Specialty Practices
The Medicare Annual Enrollment Period runs October 15 through December 7, sitting directly on top of the consumer holiday shopping calendar and competing for some of the same paid media inventory. Practices with any Medicare-eligible patient base should be running dedicated enrollment-period campaigns now, not treating it as background noise to the holiday rush. Separately, flexible spending account deadlines create a genuine year-end demand spike for elective procedures and specialty care, and January brings a predictable wave of new-year health and wellness search intent worth building content around well before the calendar turns.
Legal Services
Family law and estate planning firms see a real, well-documented spike in inquiries starting in early January as New Year’s resolutions translate into life decisions. Personal injury firms should be building content and campaigns around holiday travel risk and holiday party liability well before December arrives, not after an incident has already happened. Our work with Alpizar Law, where a properly structured paid and organic program alongside a rebuilt intake funnel drove 240 percent growth in online lead conversions within 90 days, shows what a disciplined program looks like in a legal practice regardless of season.
Home Services, Construction, and Manufacturing
For weather-driven trades, the holiday season is often a genuine slow period, which makes it the right time for financing offers, gift-card-style promotions for services like HVAC tune-ups, and content built for the January rush that follows. On the B2B and manufacturing side, the calendar works differently. Year-end is when a meaningful share of corporate buyers face use-it-or-lose-it budget pressure, and procurement and RFP activity often accelerates in Q4 as companies commit remaining budget before it resets. A manufacturer or industrial supplier that goes quiet in November and December is skipping one of the more reliable demand windows of its entire year.
Financial Services and Professional Services
Year-end tax planning, retirement contribution deadlines, and charitable giving windows all create legitimate, time-sensitive content opportunities for CPAs, financial advisors, and wealth managers, and none of it should wait until January to publish. On the B2B side, the same year-end budget pressure that affects manufacturers affects consulting and professional services firms, making Q4 a strong window for demand-testing and remarketing to prospects who have been considering an engagement but have not yet signed.
Real Estate
Holiday inventory tends to be lower and more serious, since buyers and sellers active in November and December usually have a real reason to move rather than a casual one. Content built around relocating for the new year, staging for holiday-season showings, and getting ahead of the traditional spring listing surge all perform well in this window, and agents who stay visible through the season pick up serious leads with less competition for attention.
Restaurants and Hospitality
Corporate holiday parties, catering, and private events represent a genuine seasonal revenue spike, and as we found researching Downtown Melbourne’s own comeback, the businesses that treat every event as a content and review opportunity rather than a single night’s revenue are the ones building lasting visibility out of a few weeks of foot traffic. That same logic applies to any restaurant or venue with banquet or private event capacity, regardless of location.
Balancing New Trends With What Already Works
Every year brings a new channel that gets treated as the thing that changes everything. Sometimes it does. AI-driven discovery is a real, structural shift, not a fad, and the data throughout this piece backs that up. But I have watched enough seasons come and go to know that the brands who lose the most ground during the holidays are rarely the ones who moved too slowly on a new channel. They are the ones who gutted a proven program to chase one.
The right approach is not choosing between what is new and what is proven. It is sequencing them correctly. Protect the foundation first: email and SMS built on a real segmented list, a promotional calendar that starts before Black Friday rather than on it, a mobile-first checkout experience, and local presence that is accurate and active. That foundation should never be at risk, because it is what generates the bulk of holiday revenue for almost every business we work with, in every season we have run.
Then treat new channels, whether that is a branded AI shopping agent, deeper investment in generative and answer engine optimization, or a real social commerce presence, as a bounded, measured test rather than a full replacement for what already works. Give it a real budget and a real chance to prove itself against a clear benchmark, but do not pull resources away from your highest-performing existing channel to fund it, especially not in the six weeks that generate the largest share of your annual revenue. A losing season rarely comes from moving too slowly on AI. It comes from breaking something that worked in order to chase something that had not been proven yet.
That is the same discipline behind every program we build at Brevard SEM: research before spend, a foundation that already works protected first, and new channels earned into the budget with real evidence rather than assumed into it because everyone else is talking about them. If you want a clear picture of where your current holiday program stands heading into Q4, our free diagnostic at brevardsem.com/scan shows how your site and product data currently look to both search engines and AI platforms. To build a full plan for this season, book a strategy session.
Senior team. No junior reps. No guessing, this holiday season or any other.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should a business start its holiday marketing campaigns?
Based on the most recent NRF and Prosper Insights survey data, more than half of shoppers begin holiday shopping in October or earlier, with meaningful numbers starting in September. Campaigns, email lists, and promotional calendars should be in place well before Halloween, not built the week after Thanksgiving.
How much of 2026 holiday eCommerce traffic will come from AI?
Salesforce’s 2026 Holiday Predictions report projects that roughly 20 percent of all holiday eCommerce traffic this season will originate from AI chat agents, including consumer-facing bots, autonomous agents, and competitor price-matching scrapers.
Is it worth building a branded AI shopping assistant for the holidays?
The data supports it for retailers with the product data to back it up. Salesforce found that retailers running a branded AI shopper agent saw 59 percent higher holiday sales growth in 2025 than those without one. The risk sits in launching one on thin or inconsistent product data, since research shows a majority of consumers will abandon an AI shopping tool entirely after a single wrong recommendation.
Do businesses outside of retail need a holiday marketing plan?
Yes. Healthcare practices face a Medicare enrollment deadline that overlaps the holiday calendar, legal and financial services see predictable New Year’s intent spikes, B2B and manufacturing companies often see year-end budget-driven demand, and any business with holiday-adjacent seasonality has a real opportunity if it plans for it rather than treating the season as retail-only.
What is the biggest mistake brands make with AI during the holiday season?
Treating AI visibility as an afterthought bolted onto an existing SEO or content strategy rather than its own discipline. Brands with outdated or inconsistent product data are the ones most likely to get recommended incorrectly by an AI agent, and research shows consumers have very little tolerance for that kind of mistake once it happens.
