Target reported its Q2 results on Wednesday, showing comparable sales up 3.8% and guest traffic up 3.6%. CEO Michael Fiddelke told investors that digital traffic coming from AI platforms is growing at more than 3.5 times the industry rate.
Target was also one of the first major retailers to launch across ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot simultaneously. The company said momentum was already visible in the prior quarter: in Q1, AI-driven traffic surged 2,000% year over year.
Industry context and figures
Target's observations line up with other market data. In April, Adobe reported that AI-driven retail traffic was up 393% industry-wide, and that AI-referred shoppers converted at 42% higher rates and spent 37% more per visit. Etsy has identified agentic search as an incremental traffic driver.
Taken together, these data points illustrate how a new customer-acquisition channel forms: first the industry-level signals, then early adopters move, and finally the impact shows up in earnings lines. Target's claim of 3.5x growth is less about raw volume and more about being the retailer AI platforms point shoppers toward when asked for recommendations.
Why this matters
Learning to optimize for Google search took retailers nearly a decade. By comparison, AI-driven shopping became significant enough to appear in a retailer's quarterly report within roughly four months. This suggests the next learning curve for retailers will evolve much faster than prior platform shifts.
In short, Target's Q2 results and supporting industry data indicate that AI referrals have rapidly turned into a measurable, standalone channel in retail, and early presence on AI platforms can confer strategic advantage.
