NetMarketShare
Ecommerce market share, AI referral trends, and verifiable real-user data — coming back
For more than a decade, NetMarketShare set the standard for accurate, bot-filtered web usage data. We're returning with a sharper focus: ecommerce market share, the AI referral trends now reshaping online retail, and verifiable real-user data — the kind of numbers you can defend in front of a board, an auditor, or an investor.
AI referrals are rewriting ecommerce — we'll measure it
For twenty years, ecommerce trends were driven by Google, Amazon search, and social. That era is ending. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude are now answering the queries that used to start a shopping journey on a search engine — and increasingly, the link the user clicks goes straight to a product page.
The new NetMarketShare will track how much of every ecommerce category's traffic comes from AI assistants, and how fast that share is moving:
- AI referral share by retailer — what percent of Amazon, Walmart, Target, Shopify-store, and DTC traffic now originates from an AI assistant
- AI referral share by category — where AI is already a top-three referrer (electronics, travel, software) vs. where it's still emerging (grocery, fashion)
- Per-assistant breakdown — ChatGPT vs. Perplexity vs. Gemini vs. Copilot vs. Claude as commerce drivers, not just chat tools
- AI vs. classic search — the substitution rate from Google/Bing to AI assistants, tracked monthly
- Conversion-relevant AI traffic — not just raw clicks, but real human sessions that reach product, cart, and checkout pages
What's coming: ecommerce market share
Who actually owns ecommerce in your category? Not "monthly active users," not vendor-reported GMV — real, comparable, bot-filtered web share across the retailers and marketplaces your customers actually buy from.
- Marketplaces — Amazon, eBay, Walmart Marketplace, Etsy, Mercado Libre, Rakuten
- Direct-to-consumer retail — Apple, Nike, Costco, Target, Best Buy and other category leaders
- Vertical leaders — grocery, fashion, electronics, home, beauty, auto
- Emerging challengers — Shein, Temu, TikTok Shop and the next wave of cross-border retail
What's coming: ecommerce trends
Share is a snapshot. Trends are the signal. Beyond AI referrals, the new NetMarketShare will surface the directional moves that matter:
- Category-level share shifts month over month
- Mobile vs. desktop ecommerce mix and where it's heading
- Cross-border retail growth and which markets are accelerating
- Social-commerce referrers (TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest) flowing into checkout
What's coming: verifiable user data
Anyone can publish a chart. The question is whether you'd stake a decision on it. We rebuild credibility the same way we did the first time:
- Real humans, not bots — the same fraud-detection lineage that made our data the industry reference, now updated for AI scrapers and modern datacenter traffic
- Verifiable provenance — every data point traceable to an auditable measurement, not a black-box model
- Transparent methodology — published, reviewable, defensible — not a marketing deck
- Independent — not owned by a platform, an ad network, or a retailer whose own numbers we'd be reporting on
