The machines are coming to Black Friday.
Some to buy, some to lie.
One is a customer with a budget and an errand across Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). The other is why nearly 1 in 5 retail visits is now invalid, the highest we’ve ever measured heading into a peak season. Your analytics can’t tell them apart. This report can, with network data on what’s really arriving this BFCM, what it wants, and what to let it do.
In this report, we cover:
- How much retail traffic is AI agents, how fast it’s growing, and how deep into your purchase path it already reaches
- How to tell a real shopping agent from traffic dressed up as one
- The 7-point BFCM readiness checklist you can run before November
Nearly 1 in 5 retail visits is now fake
Contamination has nearly tripled in two years, and it’s still climbing into BFCM.
Invalid traffic made up 7.1% of retail visits during BFCM 2024 and 11.7% during BFCM 2025. Through summer 2026, it’s held near 20%, and last year invalid traffic grew four times faster than real traffic heading into the November peak. The bots and the fake agents read the same retail calendar you do.
What is invalid traffic in eCommerce?
Invalid traffic refers to any website visit that isn’t a genuine potential customer, such as bots, spoofed identities, scrapers, or automation tools dressed up as shoppers. This type of traffic can inflate your numbers without ever converting, which means your analytics, ad spend, and even your algorithms are learning from visitors who were never going to buy anything.
What percentage of Black Friday traffic is invalid?
By summer 2026, invalid traffic was holding near 20%, a jump from 11.7% during 2025’s Black Friday and 7.1% in 2024, nearly tripling in two years. Our report breaks down exactly what’s driving that spike, and how much worse it gets once BFCM hits.
How much of retail website traffic is AI agents in 2026?
The CHEQ BFCM Report found nearly 1 in 5 AI agent visits across the entire network land on a retail or eCommerce site. This share has grown roughly fivefold this year alone. Our report shows exactly where on your site those agents are landing, and why.
Can AI agents make purchases online?
Yes, but not at scale, yet. Most agent shopping trips in 2026 still end with a human clicking “buy.” But the payment rails are already live, with Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and even Meta’s new shopping agent now having the ability to complete a checkout on a customer’s behalf.
Should retailers block all bot traffic?
Not anymore. Some of what looks like a bot or invalid traffic is actually a legitimate AI shopping agent carrying real purchase intent, and blocking it just sends that customer somewhere else, quietly, with no error in your funnel report. The smarter move is knowing which is which, and our report explains how that’s done at scale.
How do you tell if a website visitor is a real AI agent or invalid traffic pretending to be one?
Retail sites can no longer rely on what the traffic claims to be. This Black Friday, legitimate agents increasingly look like ordinary browsers, and malicious traffic is engineered to look legitimate. Telling them apart requires evidence, not declarations: signals read from actual behavior, not a user-agent string. Our report lays out exactly what that verification requires.