AI traffic to Swedish e-commerce is exploding, and it converts better than Google
Traffic from AI services to Swedish online retailers grew roughly 275 percent in February, year over year. Purchases grew even faster: 472 percent. And the visitors arriving from ChatGPT and similar services convert better than the ones arriving from Google. The channel is still a small slice of total traffic, but that slice has quadrupled in just over a year. So when a customer asks ChatGPT for a shop in your niche, do you get recommended, or does your competitor?
Purchases are growing faster than traffic
The figures come from analytics firm Adrelevance, reported by Dagens Näringsliv, and compare February 2026 with the same month a year earlier. Traffic from AI services to Swedish e-retailers grew by roughly 275 percent. The number of purchases rose 472 percent and revenue 414 percent. Purchases and revenue are growing considerably faster than traffic, and it shows up in the conversion rate, up just over 52 percent. More visitors are arriving, and each one is likelier to buy.
Visitors who have already made up their minds
February is not a one-off. Back in early summer 2025, Adrelevance measured a conversion rate from AI search engines 72 percent higher than organic Google traffic, based on aggregated data from Swedish e-retailers over the window May 24 to June 22, 2025.
The same pattern shows up outside Sweden. Klarna's own commerce data, spanning more than 100 million products and 400 million merchant listings across 13 markets, showed traffic from AI platforms to retail sites growing nearly 700 percent during the 2025 holiday season, with those shoppers converting at 31 percent higher rates than other traffic. And 11.4 percent versus 5.3, roughly double, is Similarweb's global estimate for how ChatGPT-referred visits convert compared with organic search, from its 3rd Annual Global Ecommerce Report. Someone clicking through from an AI answer has already let the model do the comparison and arrives halfway to a decision. We've dug deeper into that pattern, including where the evidence conflicts, in AI sends less traffic, but it's worth far more.
A small share today, but look at the curve
AI traffic still accounted for just 0.16 percent of total Swedish e-commerce traffic in February, down from 0.19 percent in January, and growth cooled from 413 percent in January to 275 percent in February. This is not a channel replacing Google tomorrow.
But compare that with where this started. In January 2025, AI tools drove just 0.04 percent of traffic. Even then, traffic was up 6,255 percent year over year, revenue 18,006 percent and transactions 8,400 percent, measured across 10 to 15 million monthly sessions to Swedish e-retailers. By May 2025, traffic was up 5,092 percent year over year and another 36 percent just since April, and the transaction share had climbed from 0.05 to 0.07 percent.
Where the traffic comes from is also clear: ChatGPT drives by far the most AI traffic and sales to Swedish e-retailers, and a StatCounter measurement highlighted by Adrelevance gave ChatGPT 89.8 percent of the Swedish AI chatbot market in March 2025, versus 6.82 percent for Perplexity and 2.32 percent for Gemini. If you want the fuller picture of how AI visibility works for the Swedish market specifically, we've laid it out in AI visibility for Swedish companies: how GEO works.
What you actually do now
Keep your Google budget where it is. The numbers make a narrower point: a position in this channel is cheap to build right now, while most of your competitors still plan everything around Google and Meta. In practice the work looks like this:
1. Find out where you stand. Ask the questions your customers ask ChatGPT: "best webshop for X", "where do I buy Y in Sweden". Do you get named? Do your competitors? That's your baseline, and it can be measured systematically instead of guessed at.
2. Let the AI bots in. Many shops block GPTBot and similar crawlers out of habit. That makes you invisible in the one channel that now converts best. We've covered why blanket blocking now costs more than it protects in 'Block all AI bots' is now actively costing you visibility.
3. Clean up your structured data. Products, prices, stock status, reviews and organisation info in correct schema.org markup make it easy for an AI model to understand your shop and represent it accurately.
4. Write content that can be cited. AI answers are built from sources that answer concrete questions: comparisons, buying guides, sizing guides, shipping and returns policies in plain language. Thin category pages don't get cited.
5. Measure the channel separately. Segment referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and the other AI domains in your analytics, and see for yourself whether the conversion pattern above holds in your shop.
FAQ
Sources: Dagens Näringsliv/Adrelevance (March 2026), Adrelevance on conversion rates, Adrelevance on AI traffic to Swedish e-retailers, AdRelevance/StatCounter on market share, Market, Klarna and Similarweb. Statistics are drawn from publicly available reports and articles from 2025 and 2026.
Thumbnail: PostNord parcel lockers by ThibautRe, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The treated version of the CC BY-SA original is shared under the same licence.
