Black Friday: The organic opportunity brands can’t ignore
Black Friday isn’t just another sale – it’s the Super Bowl of search. Every November, UK consumers flood online retailers, hunting for the best deals on everything from TVs to trainers. In 2024, British shoppers spent over £9.2 billion across Black Friday weekend, and 2025 is shaping up to be even bigger. Search activity spikes weeks before the sales go live, with millions of consumers looking for price comparisons, reviews, and stock availability to get purchase-ready.
In other words: if you’re not visible when they search, you’re not in the running when they buy.
How AI is shaping Black Friday shopping
This Black Friday marks a turning point. AI isn’t just influencing search – it is search.
According to new data, 61% of consumers have already used AI tools to shop, from comparing prices to summarising reviews and discovering products tailored to their preferences. During major retail events, AI-driven traffic has skyrocketed – with four times more AI bot traffic driven to ecommerce sites in 2025 than the previous year.
Shoppers are turning to AI chatbots and shopping agents across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Bing to find the best deals – often bypassing traditional search engines altogether. That means Black Friday visibility now depends on how easily AI platforms can find, understand and recommend your products.
If your content isn’t optimised for AI, you’re invisible to the fastest-growing segment of search traffic.
Win this Black Friday with Found’s Everysearch approach
Search has evolved. Once, it meant Google. Now, it’s everywhere. Consumers discover products through social search, AI assistants, chatbots, and influencer-led microsearch moments.
At Found, our Everysearch™ approach helps brands stay visible in this fragmented landscape – whether customers are asking Google, TikTok, or ChatGPT. We connect performance, content and visibility strategies so that wherever consumers search, your brand is ready to be found.
This Black Friday, that means optimising for AI search – ensuring your product data, content and technical foundations are ready to appear in AI-generated results, shopping recommendations and conversational comparisons.
AI Agents: Your Brand’s New Shopping Assistant
AI agents are the next step in ecommerce evolution, intelligent systems that can research, compare, and even purchase products on behalf of consumers.
Picture this: A shopper asks, “Who’s offering the best Black Friday deal on organic cotton dresses?” The AI compares retailers, checks stock and pricing, then recommends the best option, sometimes even completing the checkout automatically.
The question is: will your products be the ones it finds?
How AI Platforms Discover and Rank Your Content
To appear in AI search results, your site needs to be both discoverable and understandable to AI platforms. Here’s how they work:
- Indexing: AI bots (like those from Bing, ChatGPT or Perplexity) crawl your site to find and catalogue URLs. If your pages aren’t indexed, they’re invisible.
- Model Training: LLMs (large language models) train on the content they find — shaping what they “know” about your brand, products and industry both from brand websites and third-party sources.
- Live Retrieval: AI systems use real-time data (via RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation) to fetch up-to-date info like prices, inventory and reviews.
- Product Feeds: AI uses structured data to match search intent with live stock and deals.
If your pages aren’t accessible or structured correctly, AI bots can’t “see” your content – meaning your products won’t appear in AI search results.
Getting Found on AI Search This Black Friday: Top Tips
Ready to make sure your brand gets found first? Here’s how to win with Black Friday AI search optimisation:
- Make your site bot-friendly.
Ensure key Black Friday pages are easy for AI crawlers to access and render. Avoid hiding content behind JavaScript-heavy layouts, and use pre-rendered HTML where possible and ensure you’re not blocking AI bots from crawling. - Optimise internal linking.
Curate Black Friday landing pages and link your top product deals across site sections – making it simple for both users and bots to find your best offers. - Refresh your structured data.
Use schema like Product, SalePrice and Review to help AI platforms identify key information such as price, availability and ratings. - Update metadata and on-page copy.
Refresh last year’s Black Friday content with current dates, offers and CTAs. Align metadata with intent-driven keywords like “eco Black Friday deals” or “best tech sale UK 2025.” - Leverage first-party data.
Analyse search queries from your own data (e.g., Google Search Console) to identify what your audience actually wants – then reflect that in your copy and structured data. - Create content for comparisons.
Shoppers want quick answers. Build comparison pages, “top deals” blogs, and curated roundups – ideal for feeding into AI recommendations. - Make reviews visible.
93% of consumers say reviews influence their purchase decisions – yet AI bots often can’t read reviews hidden in JavaScript. Pre-render them for maximum impact.
- Track AI visibility.
After Black Friday, review your logs to see which AI bots visited your site and what they indexed. Visibility now matters as much as traffic.
From Found to found first
AI search is redefining discoverability. This Black Friday, brands that adapt to AI-driven search behaviour will see the biggest gains, not just in clicks, but in conversions and customer loyalty.
Found’s Everysearch™ approach ensures your brand is visible across every digital touchpoint – from AI SEO to retail search and ecommerce optimisation – helping you own the conversation from search to sale.
Get in touch with Found to ensure your brand gets found first this Black Friday.
