Lyro Research Finds AI Influences Half of Purchase Decisions but Receives Credit for Less Than 1% of Web Traffic
Read the executive summary, download the report for more.
Page 2 of 3.
Page 3 of 3.
New report documents the "dark AI" attribution gap concealing AI's role in an emerging demand channel, and maps the infrastructure being built around it.
AI shelf readiness touches feeds, pricing, reviews, and policy. No single team owns all of that. The brands falling behind aren't losing on strategy, they're losing on accountability.”
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, March 24, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Half of consumers now use AI as their primary or preferred source for product research, according to McKinsey. Contentsquare's analysis of actual retail web traffic puts AI-referred sessions at 0.2% of total visits. Both figures are accurate — and the gap between them is the subject of a new research report published today by Lyro.— Bart Turczynski, Head of Growth at Tidio
The report, "AI in E-Commerce in 2026: The New Shopping Funnel", draws on 70 sources including McKinsey, Contentsquare, Similarweb, Bain, and Lyro's own platform data. Its central finding is that AI is shaping purchase decisions at a scale that standard attribution models are structurally unable to capture.
The mechanism is straightforward. A consumer asks an AI assistant which product to buy, receives a shortlist of recommendations, and navigates directly to one of those brands via a new browser tab or a branded search. The resulting session registers as direct or organic traffic. The AI that initiated the journey receives no attribution. The report terms this "dark AI" — influence that is commercially real and analytically invisible.
The conversion data from sessions that do get tagged as AI-referred suggests the undercounting is significant. Similarweb's analysis of U.S. retail data finds ChatGPT-referred sessions convert at 11.4% — the highest rate of any measured channel, ahead of direct traffic at 10.2%, paid search at 9.3%, and organic search at 5.3%. A conversion premium of that magnitude implies that tagged AI referrals represent a high-intent fraction of a substantially larger pool of AI-influenced journeys.
The attribution gap is widening, not narrowing. TollBit's analysis of AI bot behavior across publisher sites finds that click-through rates from AI applications dropped nearly threefold over the course of 2025 — from 0.8% in the second quarter to 0.27% by year-end — as AI platforms consume more content while generating proportionally fewer outbound clicks.
"Brands making budget decisions based on last-click attribution are optimizing for a measurement system that cannot see what is actually driving demand," said Tytus Gołas, Founder and CEO of Tidio. "The inputs that determine AI visibility — feed completeness, structured data, review coverage — live across multiple teams in most organizations, and no one owns them because no one can see the return."
The financial stakes attached to the gap are substantial. McKinsey projects $750 billion in U.S. revenue will flow through AI-powered search by 2028, with brands that fail to prepare risking 20 to 50 percent of their traditional search traffic. Morgan Stanley estimates AI agents will influence between $190 billion and $385 billion in U.S. e-commerce spending by 2030.
The report also documents the protocol infrastructure being built to formalize AI's role in transactions. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol are creating standardized rails for AI agents to complete purchases on behalf of consumers. Consumer readiness is building faster than most projections anticipated: Omnisend's longitudinal research found that reluctance to allow AI to complete transactions dropped from 66% to 32% in five months between February and July 2025.
The full report is available for download at https://tid.io/ai_in_ecommerce_2026
For media inquiries, visit https://tid.io/newsroom
About Tidio
Tidio is an AI-powered customer service platform that unifies live chat, chatbots, and AI agents. Its Lyro AI Agent resolves customer inquiries automatically and escalates complex cases to human operators. The platform is designed for fast-growing e-commerce businesses that treat customer service as a revenue function. https://www.tidio.com
About Lyro
Lyro is Tidio's AI agent for customer service, tailored to e-commerce, SaaS, and service businesses. Lyro resolves an average of 72% of incoming tickets by taking action rather than repeating FAQs, maintains an AI CSAT score approaching 90%, and doubles as an AI shopping assistant capable of increasing average order value through product recommendations and lead collection. https://www.getlyro.ai
Bart Turczynski
Tidio
pr@pr-tidio.net
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn
Instagram
Facebook
YouTube
TikTok
X
Other
Meet Lyro, Tidio's AI agent for customer service
Legal Disclaimer:
EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
