Tidio Research Reveals 'Dark AI' Gap: AI Influences Half of Purchases but Gets Credit for Less Than 1% of Web Traffic

According to McKinsey research, half of consumers now rely on AI as their primary or preferred source for product research, yet Contentsquare's analysis of actual retail web traffic shows AI-referred sessions account for just 0.2% of total visits. This significant discrepancy forms the core finding of a new research report published by Tidio titled AI in E-Commerce in 2026: The New Shopping Funnel. The report, drawing on over 60 sources including McKinsey, Contentsquare, Similarweb, and Bain, identifies what it terms "dark AI"—commercially real influence that remains analytically invisible to standard attribution models.

The mechanism creating this gap is straightforward: a consumer asks an AI assistant for product recommendations, receives a shortlist, then navigates directly to a recommended brand via a new browser tab or branded search. The resulting web session registers as direct or organic traffic, with the initiating AI receiving no attribution. This structural inability of current models to capture AI's role creates substantial challenges for marketers making budget decisions based on traditional metrics. As Tidio Founder and CEO Tytus Gołas noted, "Brands making budget decisions based on last-click attribution are optimizing for a measurement system that cannot see what is actually driving demand."

Conversion data from the small fraction of 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%. This conversion premium implies tagged AI referrals represent a high-intent fraction of a substantially larger pool of AI-influenced journeys. The attribution gap continues to widen as AI platforms consume more content while generating proportionally fewer outbound clicks—TollBit's analysis shows click-through rates from AI applications dropped nearly threefold from 0.8% in Q2 2025 to 0.27% by year-end.

The financial implications of this measurement 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. Protocol infrastructure is being built to formalize AI's role in transactions, with Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol creating standardized rails for AI agents to complete purchases. Consumer readiness is building faster than anticipated—Omnisend research found reluctance to allow AI to complete transactions dropped from 66% to 32% between February and July 2025. The full report is available for download at https://www.getlyro.ai/reports/ai-in-ecommerce.