December 18, 2025 |

Coal In Your Stocking

The holidays are here and, in America at least, that means one thing: SHOPPING! And while Black Friday tramplings have largely moved online to Cyber Monday, there is a new player in the holiday shopping season this year: AI. Just how big is the AI shopping craze you may ask?
Adobe just reported AI traffic to retail sites is up 760% YoY this holiday season as Cyber Monday hit a record $14.3B. ChatGPT launched Shopping Research last month. Not to be outdone, Perplexity launched Instant Buy just one day later. This is officially the first holiday season where AI is shaping purchase decisions at scale. And if your products aren’t there, you may wind up with coal in your stocking. So what are the technical drivers AI is looking for? And how can you adjust your content and product flows to wind up prominently featured in what has become the fastest growing consumer sector of all time?

Today’s workflow focuses on the world’s most popular content management system: Wordpress. Many experienced ecommerce pros will likely have a similar flow in place already. But for those just starting out, getting the basics right can gain you AI visibility overnight.

For all the reasons listed above, ecommerce brands, founders with merch stores and anyone that sells B2C (or work devices) knows how necessary getting into AI shopping workflows is right now. But information about how to gain visibility is opaque and technical for many. Getting started with these (mostly free) Wordpress plugins and the AI tool of your choice can get you on your way to joining the millions shopping on AI right now. If you want to fully automate or you have larger product catalogs, consider upgrading RankMath and adding WP All Import Pro.

› Add schema markup (code that explains to machines what your content is using structured data) to hundreds of product pages at scale.

› Automate the creation of vital AI catnip like FAQs and product descriptions.

› Trigger a workflow whenever you add a new product.

› Inject Customer Reviews into all product pages for increased visibility.

› Trigger when a new product page is added in WooCommerce. You can pass pertinent info to Claude and pre-load a prompt to automate the creation of key product page elements.

› Create schema templates using RankMath--for best AI results, start with Product, FAQ and Aggregate Rating. Once in place, add to your workflow to ingest product data from AI into your product page.

› TrustIndex helps you aggregate reviews from across the internet. They can also help you add dimension to your aggregate rating (stars, links) and pull ratings into product and website pages directly. This adds social proof, which AI is looking for.

While getting this workflow to fully automate and scale is not free (you’ll need to upgrade if you want to use AI/Make/Zapier at scale or update more than 1000 products), the limited initial time investment using free versions can get you started, allowing you to track product visibility and gauge the investment for yourself (by my calculations, its about $17 a month to fully automate thousands of products). Either way, getting into AI shopping flows has become non-negotiable and this gets you in the game.

Want to build something like this for your business? ➡️ We can help ➡️

Amazon's Nova Act—an AI agent that can automate online shopping and other browser-based tasks—became generally available this month after launching as a research preview in March. The tool enables developers to build agents that can navigate websites, compare products, and complete purchases autonomously. Learn More...

Nearly half (45.5%) of U.S. TikTok users made at least one social commerce purchase on the platform. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025, TikTok Shop reported an 84% jump in livestream shopping sales. Brands like Amazon, Nike, Zara and Wal-Mart now produce high-gloss QVC-style livestreams, driving the record sales. Learn more...

Dr. Squatch has leveraged a unique branding, marketing, and digital engagement engine to capture an 8% share of the U.S. Bath Bar Soap and Skin/Body Care categories after launching in 2013, with its sales almost doubling in 2024. Unilever expects to use its technology and intel across their product lines. The deal is expected to close by EOY. Learn more...