Social commerce surges 457% and AI fashion searches rise 44% during Christmas, Captify UK data reveals

New Captify (part of Verve) data shows the UK Christmas shopping journey is becoming increasingly fragmented across social commerce, conversational AI, search and physical retail, creating a more complex festive battleground for brands looking to capture demand.

Search signals from Christmas 2025 show social commerce gifting interest grew 457% year-on-year, while viral products including Jellycat and Pop Mart’s Labubu generated demand that many bricks-and-mortar retailers struggled to meet. At the same time, conversational search for fashion advice increased 44% YoY, highlighting AI’s growing role in product inspiration, comparison and discovery.

For retailers and brand marketers planning for Christmas 2026, the findings point to a festive path to purchase where visibility increasingly needs to extend beyond traditional search and retail media into social and AI environments – while category-specific timing and changing gifting priorities create opportunities to capture demand earlier.

Captify (part of Verve), the leader in intent intelligence, analysed UK search and AI conversational intent around Christmas to identify five central trends shaping festive demand and the opportunities they create for brands and retailers.

• The festive grocery battle is being fought on both value and premiumisation: Tesco led UK festive supermarket search in 2025 with a 30% share, supported by price-matching and Clubcard offers. But M&S overtook Asda in search volume, suggesting shoppers are also willing to trade up for Christmas, while Sainsbury’s increased its festive search share at the expense of Aldi, Lidl and Morrisons. For grocery brands and retailers, the opportunity is not simply to compete on price, but to understand where shoppers are looking for value versus indulgence.

• AI is becoming a new product discovery and consideration layer: UK shoppers are already using conversational AI across Christmas planning, including decoration ideas, travel and logistics, entertainment, recipes, gift recommendations and shopping and deals. In fashion specifically, conversational search grew 44% YoY over Christmas 2025. Styling advice represented 59% of fashion prompts, followed by price comparison at 14%, size and fit at 11%, trend research at 11% and seasonal advice at 6%. This gives brands a new visibility challenge: product information, pricing and brand positioning increasingly need to perform inside AI-generated recommendations as well as conventional search results.

• Christmas gifting is shifting towards experiences and self-care: Wellness gifting increased 56% YoY, with spa treatments and massages taking 73% of category search, significantly ahead of aromatherapy and candles at 12% and sleep-related gifts at 9%. The shift gives wellness, beauty and experience-led retailers an opportunity to take a larger share of Christmas gifting budgets traditionally directed towards physical products.

• Advent calendars are becoming a broader retail category: Toy-based advent calendars dominated non-chocolate alternatives in 2025, with Lego and Pokémon together generating almost a third of non-chocolate advent calendar searches. Beauty retailers are also benefiting, with Boots, Sephora and Harrods capturing significant interest. Search behaviour is concentrated between mid-November and 1 December, creating a relatively narrow window for retailers to maximise availability, paid activation and promotional visibility.

• Tech gifting is following the creator economy: Cameras became the UK’s number-one searched-for tech gift in 2025, taking 32% share of search and overtaking games consoles at 28.9%. Smart speakers accounted for a further 20.5%. Captify’s data suggests the rise in cameras may be connected to growing social content creation, giving consumer electronics retailers an opportunity to position devices around creation and sharing rather than specifications alone.

“Christmas shopping, much like wider categories, no longer follows a predictable path from inspiration, to search, to purchase,” said Jane Wolfson, President UK & International at Captify (part of Verve). “Intent is forming across social platforms, AI tools, traditional search and retail environments, often moving between them before a shopper even reaches a product page. That means brands need to look beyond their own category or a fixed set of keywords to identify where relevant interest is growing and what needs or occasions are driving it.”

Download the full report here.

Methodology: 

The analysis draws on anonymised UK search data collected by Captify, with the majority of findings covering 1 September–31st December  2025. Individual analyses use the specific date ranges stated within the report, including longer comparison periods where year-on-year trends are presented.