TL;DR
- Weekly prompts on LLMs about Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals have risen 215% over the last 10 weeks, with about 1.5 million weekly prompts by mid-October.
- This will be the first Black Friday season with Muse agents shopping. Meta’s Muse app has been downloaded more than 10 million times with 2.5 million daily active users.
- For prompts aimed at finding holiday sales and discounts, Best Buy thrives in consumer electronics topics, while Walmart, Amazon and Target were the most visible retailers across categories.
- Models agreed less on top brands than on the top retailers. Categories with a few big players, like smartphones, had brands with high visibility on every model, but more crowded categories like clothing and furniture had no unanimously favored brand.
- Brands’ visibility varies by model, but top brands universally tallied their highest visibility scores on Meta’s Spark.
About 203 million people shopped over the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday last year, according to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey. The NRF expects even more this year, forecasting more than $1 trillion in retail spending over this November and December.
Brands and retailers will vie for their shares of that pie by offering Black Friday deals and discounts. This year, many consumers will ask AI models to find the best deals for them, or even hand over their holiday shopping entirely to agents like Meta’s Muse.
Based on Evertune’s EverPanel of millions of real internet users’ conversations with large language models (LLMs), we estimate there were about 1.5 million prompts a week about Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales by mid-October, the latest data available. That’s up 215% over the previous 10 weeks.
The vast majority of prompts, about 86%, were run on ChatGPT.
Meta’s Muse, meanwhile, has amassed more than 10 million downloads in the U.S. and about 2.5 million estimated daily active users. Users can empower the agent to make purchases on their behalf using Stripe or saved credentials, so long as retailers allow it. So far, Amazon has blocked Muse agents, while Walmart has embraced them.
Between chats and agents, models’ opinions of where to find the best deals will decide the flow of a meaningful share of holiday spending this year. To understand which retailers and brands are models’ favorites, we ran 50,000 prompts across 10 shopping verticals that typically offer Black Friday deals. We ran the prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Meta AI (specifically Muse Spark, the model the Muse agent uses). Prompts focused on where to find Black Friday deals.
AI Models’ Top Retailers
The only four retailers mentioned by every model in multiple categories were Walmart (8 categories), Best Buy (6 categories), Amazon (5 categories) and Target (3 categories). Other retailers were mentioned by every model in their niche, like Macy’s in “Clothing” and The Home Depot in “Home Appliances & Kitchen.”
Of the retailers present in multiple categories, each recorded its highest visibility on Meta AI, based on their AI Brand Scores, a metric that considers both the percentage of responses in which a brand appears and its typical position in responses.
Best Buy had the highest average AI Brand Score of the four retailers, likely due to the fact that it almost exclusively appeared in responses to consumer electronics topics where it is highly relevant, whereas omnipresent retailers like Walmart and Amazon had scores diluted by topics where they are present but less visible.
Best Buy was the most visible retailer on every model in “Laptops & Computers,” “Smartphones & Accessories” and “TVs & Home Entertainment.” Ulta Beauty was universally the top retailer in “Beauty & Personal Care,” Wayfair in “Furniture & Home Decor” and Expedia in “Travel.” Models split on the top retailer in the other topics.
AI Models’ Top Brands
Models agreed on fewer brands than retailers. Consumer electronics categories like “Laptops & Computers,” “Smartphones & Accessories” and “TVs & Home Entertainment” had the most brands mentioned by every model, but no brand was mentioned by all models in “Clothing” or “Furniture & Home Decor.”
Brands’ AI Brand Scores were often lower than those seen for retailers. For example, Nike scored just 21 out of 100 on ChatGPT, despite being the model’s most visible brand. Scores were lowest in industries with the most competition, like “Beauty & Personal Care” and “Clothing,” and highest in industries dominated by a few major brands, “TVs & Home Entertainment” and “Smartphones & Accessories.”
Samsung was the most visible brand across all models for “TVs & Home Entertainment,” Sony for “Gaming & Consoles” and Apple for “Headphones & Wearables.”
ChatGPT Shopping
Since September 2025, ChatGPT has supported a distinct in-response widget for shopping options. Although OpenAI phased out in-response purchases in March, the widget still displays products, product images, prices and links for users to purchase products on retailers’ sites. This feature is supported by several retailer partnerships, though notably Amazon does not participate.
These shopping cards appeared in 7-42% of ChatGPT responses, excluding the “Travel” category, which did not have any. “Clothing” had the fewest responses with shopping cards and “Home Appliances & Kitchen” the most.
Walmart did quite well in shopping cards. It was the most mentioned retailer in half of our categories. Best Buy, Wayfair and Ulta Beauty were the only other retailers to top a category. ChatGPT linked to 20-35 retailers per topic.
Marketing for Black Friday AI Shopping
Whether via LLM responses or agent choices, AI will play a meaningful part in deciding which brands and retailers win out in Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales this year.
To appear consistently in LLM responses requires tracking brand visibility across models, adhering to best practices for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and boosting visibility through ads where possible. Methodical and consistent GEO strategies have improved visibility for brands like At Home and Absolute Collagen over time, while thoughtfully placed ads offer an immediate lift in visibility.
How to succeed in agentic commerce, meanwhile, is still an open question. This will be the first major shopping season where agents like Muse and OpenAI’s Dots are at-the-ready to transact on behalf of millions of users. The extent to which users trust these agents to do their holiday shopping remains to be seen.
Optimizations for this new e-commerce frontier are largely untested. For now, retailers are still divided between strategies of boxing agents out, as Amazon does, or welcoming them in, as Walmart does. Brands have few, if any, options to win over agents beyond the same GEO strategies that work for LLMs more broadly.
For marketers, the window is closing to push out any final GEO efforts that can impact Black Friday shopping queries, but in-chat ad campaigns remain a viable route to quick visibility boosts. As for agents, hopefully this year’s agentic shoppers offer us some lessons.
Methodology
At Evertune, we track thousands of brands across LLMs by running millions of prompts a day. For this analysis, we ran 100 unique prompts, 10 each across 10 shopping verticals. Prompts focused on where to find the best deals on Black Friday. Prompts were repeated 100 times each for a meaningful sample size. The prompts were run on ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overview and Meta AI in October.
About Evertune
Evertune is the first Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) platform built to explore, measure, act and advertise across the entire AI customer journey, connecting brands directly to ChatGPT Ads and programmatic advertising partners like The Trade Desk and Index Exchange. Where most GEO tools sample each prompt once a day, Evertune samples every prompt 100 times per model across 11+ AI models, delivering statistically significant visibility data at half the cost of competing platforms.
Evertune's agents do the work for you: a prompt agent mines over 150 million real user conversations to find the exact questions buyers ask, an insights agent tells you what to do next each week, and an ads agent builds a complete ChatGPT campaign around your visibility gaps. From there, Evertune closes the loop with website optimization, data-driven content creation, source-level influence mapping and paid activation through affiliate and programmatic AI retargeting partners. Founded by the team that pioneered programmatic advertising at The Trade Desk, now building the next marketing channel.
