This Black Friday and Cyber Monday, millions of consumers turned to AI assistant engines to help them find the best deals and make purchasing decisions. For the first time, we have comprehensive data on which brands emerged as the AI-recommended winners.
The Black Friday Index, built on 400 million real AI conversations during the Thanksgiving shopping window, reveals the AI recommendation landscape across 25 major retail categories.
Key findings
- Electronics: Brands with structured product data and clear specification pages dominated AI recommendations
- Apparel: Sustainability and brand story content drove above-expected AI visibility
- Home goods: Aggregator site citations outweighed brand-owned page citations 3:1
- Toys: Review platform citations were the single biggest driver of AI recommendation frequency
- Deals and promotions: AI systems rarely cited promotional pricing directly, preferring evergreen value messaging
The brand that surprised everyone
The most notable finding was in consumer electronics, where a mid-size brand with exceptional product specification content outperformed all but one major retailer in AI recommendation frequency. Their secret: obsessive attention to structured data, comprehensive comparison content, and regular content refreshes aligned with product release cycles.
The full Black Friday Index, including category-by-category brand rankings, is available in the DigitAI Research Hub.