Bain & Company’s 2026 holiday retail forecast projects U.S. holiday sales will top $1 trillion for the first time, up 4.5% year over year, with online sales growing 9% and now driving 60% of total holiday sales growth, up from 50% a year earlier. Buried in the channel data is the figure that should reorder a CMO’s fourth-quarter plan: 24% of shoppers surveyed said they plan to start their holiday product searches on AI platforms such as Claude and ChatGPT, rather than a search engine or a retailer’s own site.
That is not a niche behavior anymore, it is close to a quarter of the shopping population changing where a purchase journey begins. Aaron Cheris, Bain’s Partner and Global Head of Retail, tied the shift directly to competitive pressure rather than convenience: “The key for retailers is to make the most of the crucial holiday season by striking the right balance when it comes to price and promotions, and making the most of new AI capabilities to enhance the customer experience and get ahead of competitors.”
The original insight is what this does to attribution before the season even starts. A brand that only optimizes for search-engine visibility and retail-site conversion is now blind to roughly a quarter of the discovery layer, and standard last-click or platform-reported attribution has no mechanism for crediting an AI-chat discovery moment at all. Marketing leaders building Q4 plans this month should treat AI-platform visibility as a distinct budget line to test now, not a channel to add once the data catches up, because by the time the attribution tooling matures the holiday window will already be over.
Source: Bain & Company via PR Newswire. Related: Why AI Search Keeps Erasing Familiar Brands and Brussels Just Reclassified ChatGPT as a Search Engine.
