The headline forecast is healthy too: a record £28.52bn spent online in the UK between 1 November and 31 December, up 6.2%, with Black Friday alone worth an expected £1.24bn. The categories Adobe expects AI referrals to boost most are video games, toys, electronics, appliances, jewellery and personal care.
AI traffic is still a small slice of the total. But it is growing faster than any other channel, and it behaves differently. A shopper who arrives from an AI assistant has usually been told what to buy and why. The assistant did the browsing for them, using whatever it could read about your products.
So the real question for peak isn't whether to "do AI". It's whether the assistants can find your products, understand them, and trust what they find.
How Shopify stores reach AI assistants today
As a Shopify Partner, this is the part we get asked about most, because the routes differ by channel and some of them don't apply to UK-only stores.
Shopify groups this under agentic storefronts, managed in Sales channels > Agentic in your admin. It is active by default for eligible stores.
- ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot read your products through Shopify Catalog. Both currently require your store to sell to customers in the United States, though the store itself can be based anywhere. A UK store that ships only to the UK isn't eligible for these two routes. ChatGPT sends shoppers to your own checkout; Copilot offers a Shopify-powered checkout inside the chat by default, which you can switch off.
- Google AI Mode and Gemini get your products through the Google & YouTube sales channel or Google Merchant Center. For most UK stores, that feed is the most important AI route this Christmas.
- Meta surfaces use the Facebook and Instagram sales channel.
- Personal AI agents can now shop Shopify stores through Shop MCP, which Shopify launched on 13 October. Any compatible agent, including Claude and ChatGPT, can search more than a billion products in Shopify Catalog, build a cart and create a checkout at your store. A signed-in shopper can pay with saved Shop Pay details after confirming the total and payment method. Orders land in your admin like any other order.
There is also the route nobody manages: assistants that simply crawl and index your public pages. Shopify notes your products can be surfaced that way even if you switch off Catalog access.
The good news is that you don't pick one. Every route reads from the same product data, policies and pages. Fix those once and you improve all of them.
Five things to fix before Black Friday
1. Check whether you're actually eligible
Open Sales channels > Agentic and look next to Shopify Catalog. You'll see either the number of products in the catalogue or an Ineligible warning, which you can click for the reason. Shopify needs your terms of service, privacy policy and return and refund policy completed in Settings > Policies before your store qualifies. That's a ten-minute fix that some stores have simply never done.
If you ship to the US, this is where you decide which assistants can see your range.
2. Treat your Google feed as an AI feed
For UK-focused stores, Google AI Mode and Gemini are the AI channels most likely to matter at peak, and they run on your Merchant Center data. Disapproved products, missing GTINs, vague titles and out-of-date prices don't just cost you Shopping ads now. They make you invisible in AI answers too.
Pull the diagnostics report this week and clear anything flagged before the sale prices go live.
3. Write product pages for a reader who asks questions
An assistant answering "what's a good waterproof jacket for walking in Scotland under £150?" needs facts it can quote: materials, waterproof rating, fit, care, what's in the box, delivery times. Marketing adjectives don't help it.
Shopify also advises putting any legal disclosures within the first 6,000 characters of a product description, so they reach ChatGPT. Keep the important facts near the top for every channel.
4. Fill in your store's knowledge base
Agentic storefronts include a knowledge base for the non-product facts assistants get asked about: returns process, delivery timelines, brand values. Adobe's own advice this morning was that brands must make "product data, educational buying guides, and customer support" easy to surface across AI and social channels.
Make sure your Christmas delivery cut-offs and extended returns window are in there, and that they match what your site says.
5. Make your discounts checkable
Adobe expects UK discounts to climb from 12% in early November to 25% from the start of Cyber Weekend. Assistants compare prices across stores, and shoppers are already sceptical about whether deals are real. A clear compare-at price, a sale end date and a stable product URL make your offer easier for an assistant to recommend and easier for a shopper to believe.
Measure it separately
Shopify shows orders from AI channels with channel or referrer attribution in your admin, and the Agentic page reports search and sales performance by channel. Set a baseline now, before the sales start, so you can see in December what AI traffic actually did for you. Don't let it disappear into "direct" or "referral".
Why this matters for Clarity Growth
As a Shopify Partner, we see the same pattern in most UK stores we audit. The products are good, but the data behind them was written for one website and never updated for the channels that now read it. AI assistants make that gap more expensive, because they recommend what they can understand.
We help UK retailers check agentic storefront eligibility, clean up Shopify and Merchant Center product data, write product content that answers real questions, and set up the reporting to see what AI channels are worth. With three weeks until Black Friday, the most valuable work is usually the boring kind: policies, feeds and product facts. That's exactly where we start.
Sources
Sources: Adobe UK festive forecast via Retail Technology Innovation Hub (5 Nov 2026); Shopify Help Center: agentic storefronts; Selling on ChatGPT; Selling on Microsoft Copilot; Shopify Catalog and product discovery; Shopify Developer Changelog: Shop MCP (13 Oct 2026).