Adobe projects US online holiday sales will grow 6.7% this season, and the forecast carries a second number that matters just as much for anyone selling online: traffic from AI-assisted shopping is surging.

That pairing — a mid-single-digit sales increase alongside a sharp rise in AI-referred traffic — is the core of Adobe's outlook. The company, which bases its holiday forecasts on transaction data drawn from its Adobe Analytics platform covering a large share of top US e-commerce sites, has built a track record of seasonal projections that retailers and marketers treat as a benchmark. The 6.7% figure represents continued, if moderating, expansion of online spending during the critical November–December window.

The AI traffic data point deserves closer scrutiny than the headline suggests. Shoppers increasingly arrive at retail sites through AI assistants and chat interfaces rather than conventional search or direct navigation. For sales and e-commerce teams, this changes the top of the funnel: if discovery shifts from search engine results pages to conversational AI tools, then product visibility depends on being surfaced by those tools, not just ranked in search.

What Adobe reports as surging is traffic — visits attributable to AI sources — not yet a proportional surge in revenue. The company did not state in the reported outlook what share of actual purchases AI-referred visitors complete, nor the conversion rate of that cohort against baseline traffic. That distinction between measured traffic growth and unverified revenue impact is the right lens for evaluating vendor claims in this space. Treat the 6.7% sales figure as a forecast grounded in Adobe's historical dataset; treat the AI traffic surge as directional evidence of a behavioral shift whose monetization is still being established.

For sellers, the practical implications break down by function. E-commerce teams should audit how their product catalog appears inside AI assistants, since structured, current data increases the odds of recommendation. Marketing teams allocating paid search budgets should watch whether AI-referred traffic cannibalizes or supplements search clicks over the holiday window. Leadership teams building 2025 plans should treat the holiday season as a live test of whether AI-driven discovery converts at commercially meaningful rates.

Adobe's methodology matters here. Its analytics arm observes transactions across a substantial base of US retail sites, which gives the sales forecast empirical weight. The forecast is still a projection, and holiday outcomes historically deviate a few tenths of a percentage point from initial estimates depending on discounting depth, shipping cutoffs, and macro conditions. The AI traffic figures reflect observed site visits, which is a harder measurement than survey-based intent data but still leaves open questions about repeat visits and bot contamination that any traffic dataset carries.

The numbers to watch as the season unfolds: whether realized growth lands near 6.7%, and whether Adobe or other measurement firms publish AI-referred conversion rates that would turn a traffic story into a revenue story. If those conversion figures materialize, expect AI-assisted discovery to move from an experimental channel to a line item in 2025 retail media budgets.