Less than 10% of web traffic to Edible Brands’ websites comes from artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, according to Erica Randerson, chief digital officer of Edible Brands.

Randerson told Digital Commerce 360 that Edible is looking at how its customers are finding the retailer. It’s also looking at how it shows up in more of these agentic AI platforms. That helps Edible “to ensure that omnichannel doesn’t just stop in the historical definition of the word,” she said.

“What we’ve noticed is, while the traffic we’re getting from a ChatGPT or a Claude or Perplexity may still be a small percentage, it is growing at an exponential rate,” Randerson told Digital Commerce 360. “And it’s only going to continue. So we’re really always looking for ways where we can tap into AI.”

She remembers being at a conference in early 2025 and talking about agentic AI.

“The room was just trying to figure out: What does that mean?” she recalled. “We all were thrown this new buzzword and what are we even dealing with, much less how are we optimizing for it?”

Now, Edible is making “significant investments” in its technology and data infrastructure. Randerson said there are enough signals that Edible must prepare for agentic AI’s further involvement in ecommerce.

Edible Brands is No. 182 in the Top 2000 Database. That database ranks North America’s largest online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.

How Edible is adjusting to traffic from AI sources

Traffic from AI platforms is “still a pretty small bucket for us in terms of what we’re seeing,” Randerson said. “We’re learning alongside everyone else.”

She noted that Edible anticipates continued exponential growth based on how customers are shopping using AI platforms as another channel.

Part of Edible’s preparations include replatforming from a homegrown, legacy system for its ecommerce site to using Shopify, as well as its point-of-sale (POS) system. As of when Digital Commerce 360 spoke with Randerson, that replatforming process was not yet complete.

“Shopify has been one of the larger technology partners that has really deepened relationships with a lot of the AI engines out there,” Randerson stated. “We believe it’s going to be at the forefront of developing more in-LLM [large language model] shopping opportunities that we want to be showing up for very early on.”

She said LLMs are changing consumer behavior regarding search. Rather than using keywords such as “chocolate-covered strawberries” in a search bar, consumers are now asking questions and making requests. As an example, she explained that a consumer might go to an AI platform and type in: “Get best gift for my uncle who loves X, Y and Z.”

“We’ve seen a lot of change in the data that we’re collecting through our own on-site search,” Randerson added. “That’s really helping inform us of this trend of how customers interact with LLMs. It is transitioning into how they expect to be able to interact with websites.”

That underlines the importance of investing now in both the data and the infrastructure, she said. That’s what will support Edible Brands leaning into AI referrals as that traffic source grows, she added.

Other ways Edible Brands is using AI

“AI is something that we’ve really embraced, not just in the lens of ecommerce over the past year, but holistically as a company,” Randerson said.

In addition to tapping into it for web traffic, she shared that Edible also has plans to use AI for customer experience. That includes improving both in-store operations and the ecommerce experience for customers. It also includes using AI to make Edible’s supply chain more efficient.

Edible currently uses AI on its ecommerce site to assist with merchandising decisions in real time, Randerson said.

She added that Edible Brands has its own data science team, and within it is an AI division that the retailer is building out.

“I wouldn’t count us out for having some more direct paths [to AI integration] as well,” she stated. “But initially will likely be the path through Shopify.”

Currently, more than 110 of the Top 2000 online retailers in North America use Shopify as their ecommerce platform, according to Digital Commerce 360 data. In 2025, the combined web sales of all Top 2000 retailers that used Shopify’s ecommerce platform reached $10.458 billion.

Do you rank in our databases? 

Submit your data and we’ll see where you fit in our next ranking update.

Sign up

Stay on top of the latest developments in the online retail industry. Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 Retail News. Follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and YouTube. Be the first to know when Digital Commerce 360 publishes news content.