🚨BREAKING: Claude Has Product Cards! Plus Adobe Reports 138% y/y Growth in AI Driven Retail Traffic and Much More!

Claude throws a big curveball coming into Holiday 26 *PLUS* Adobe drops a ton of great datapoints on AI traffic growth and it's time to update ourAgentic Commerce Autonomy Tracker.

Two big breaking news items to report on today, let’s dig in.

👀 First Look at Claude’s New Agentic Commerce Product Cards 🎉

Our ReFiBuy monitoring agents are constantly running product-related prompts across all the Answer Engines. Yesterday, very unexpectedly they started reporting that Claude is now showing product cards. Here’s an example for a hairdryer:

It’s important to note that these Claude Product Cards are pervasive across all categories. Here’s a collage of a variety of product cards across several categories from electronics to pet to fashion and beauty:

While these are rudimentary, the intent is clear here. If you recall back on Feb 9th, we pointed out that Claude had mentioned they are “particularly interested in the potential of agentic commerce, where Claude acts on a user’s behalf to handle a purchase.”

In that same piece we pointed to reports from NRF in January that Anthropic was meeting with Merchants and we’re aware of representatives that were at Shoptalk also holding highly confidential meetings.

Historically, over the 27yrs I’ve been working in retail, this time of year is when new features are frequently introduced with a ramp into the Holiday selling season. Could we see Claude rapidly go from ‘Research→Find→Buy’ in time for Holiday 26?

Updating The Five Levels of Agentic Commerce Tracker: Claude ‘up’ and Perplexity ‘down’.

Here’s our updated Agentic Commerce Levels of Autonomy tracker:

As the arrows indicate, we are downgrading Perplexity to Level-1: Research. Not only has Perplexity removed the buy capability, but according to our Monitoring agents, they have eliminated all Product Cards. Optically Perplexity seems to be focusing on the financial vertical and their Computer agent (kind of an OpenClaw type user agent with more rails that OpenClaw).

At the same time Perplexity is moving down, we are now upgrading Claude from Research to Find due to their first iteration into Product Cards.

That yields this end-state for where we are today on the tracker (minus the arrows in case you want a clean version).

Note you are free to use this in your presentations, we appreciate attribution for Retailgentic and a link back if you do publish it online.

That’s not the only big Agentic Commerce news today→

Adobe Releases Q3 AI Traffic Report: AI-Driven Retail Traffic is up a Startling 138% Y/Y!

The first datapoint Adobe dropped is that Retail sales accelerated to 138% y/y growth (the green line above). That’s impressive, but check out the yellow line! AI driven travel spiked 194% y/y. Financial services spiked to 105% y/y as well. My educated guess is as Gemini and ChatGPT - the big 2 from a traffic-perspective are ramping up their ad programs, they are working on the user experience, perhaps adding touches like product cards and other elements that are accelerating this move.

Also note that going back to October 2024, AI Driven Retail Sales are up 1,324%! obviously it’s a small base, but at 138% it’s not slowing down, it’s accelerating!

On top of that, this is not ‘garbage firehose traffic’→

Look at this trend, as Answer Engines are building out their training set, building up memory capabilities and understanding Shopper Intent, and getting better at Product-level information - the ‘match rate’ is growing rapidly. Today swirl all that together and visits initiated by Answer Engines are worth 53% more.

The Adobe Q3 Report offers two insights into why:

On top of consumer sentiment improvement (this is from a n=3,000 survey performed in March 2026), Adobe has some pretty crazy data that is the first statistic I’ve see on the topic of Agentic Commerce and returns:

There’s a lot of scary aspects of Agentic Commerce:

• Rapidly changing traffic patterns

• Increasing evidence that Google is accelerating the path to zero clicks

• Lot’s of hard work to upgrade your catalog that can seem insurmountable

• An alphabet’s soup of protocols

• New players entering and leaving the arena at a frenetic pace (see above)

But what if Answer Engines are a bit of a Holy Grail? Evidence is mounting to support this:

• The traffic converts 54% higher (the real-world data I can see points to significantly higher than this believe-it-or-not)

• The AI Ads are significantly more performant than pre-AI Ads

• And now…Agentic Commerce Traffic could reduce returns 69% 🤯

Finally, while Google is acceleration the decrease in SEO/SEM traffic, Answer Engines growth is accelerating. I believe the ‘traditional search’ and 'Answer Engine Search’ lines are going to cross faster than anyone ever predicted.

Adobe’s Updated Demographic Information: Zillennials Are Driving the Agentic Commerce Trends

These types of adoption curves are common - in the early days of E-commerce it was the same thing. What’s new, is this curve is more pronounced. That delta between 53% at Gen Z and 34% at Baby Boomers is a 19% difference - huge.

Where to go for More Information?

If these trends are interesting to you and helpful, the complete Adobe report is available for download here→

Q3 2026 Ai Sourced Traffic Insights

7.8MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Also this weekend we surfaced 8 news items that are on-topic for these trends that you should read if you find these topics of interest:

What’s Next?

We’ll continue to keep a very close eye on Claude’s implementation of Agentic Commerce, stay tuned for more details as we find them!