According to a YouGov report on Black Friday shopping, planned AI use among UK shoppers has almost doubled in a year, from 19% in 2025 to 34% in 2026. With more than a third of shoppers now planning to use AI on the busiest shopping day of the year, CRO specialist Blend Commerce wanted to see how many retailers were ready for this wave of bots accessing their sites.
To achieve this, it conducted a study that aimed to answer four key questions when it comes to the AI agent shopping experience: can it access your site?; can it find the products?; can it read and understand them?; and can it get a basket to the checkout?
To answer these questions, Blend sent an AI shopping agent to 200 UK and US retailers to analyse them on a number of factors. Combined, this gave each retailer a score out of 100.
The study was built from 20 sectors, each featuring 10 retailers. Five from the US and five from the UK, made up of two large businesses, two mid businesses and one emerging business from each country.
Overall, the average score across the study was 65 out of 100. Furniture retailers averaged 81, making them the second-best-performing sector behind baby and nursery retailers, with an average score of 88. The worst was fashion, with an average score of 49.
Heal’s led the UK furniture retailers with 94, followed by Mattressman (92) and Dreams (88). In the US, Slumberland led with 90, followed by Wayfair (86). One in seven (29 of 200) retailers refused an AI shopping agent at the door, yet not one of the 29 blocks AI in its robots.txt. None of those 29 were furniture retailers.
Room for improvement in furniture retailers was in the details they include for their products, says Blend: Only three out of the 10 they looked at – Mattressman, Dreams and Wayfair – included delivery and returns information in their product data. Seven of 10 were also missing barcode numbers, which AI agents can use to match the same product across different stores.
Adam Pearce, co-founder and CEO of Blend Commerce, says: “Furniture retailers have got the hardest part right – an AI agent can get into the shop. A lot of much bigger retailers can’t say that.
“The next job is making sure the agent can read what a furniture buyer actually asks about, like delivery dates and returns, because on Black Friday that’s what it will compare.
“If you’re spending money on being found in ChatGPT, Claude and wherever else, spend 10 minutes before Black Friday checking what an agent sees when it reaches your product pages.”
