Geo: Europe
Area: Software
Type: Consumer
Theme: AI
🌀 Key points
28% use AI to research travel purchases
Electronics and DIY follow at 26% and 23%
Fashion, pets, and cleaning rank lowest in AI usage
💎 Data Gem
🧠 AI Is Picking Your Next Trip
If you’re booking a holiday or buying a new laptop in 2025, there’s a good chance AI helped seal the deal.
According to Verdane’s latest study, active AI users are embracing conversational tools to compare, research, and decide across a wide range of categories—but some stand out more than others.
🗺️ What’s the Maze?
Verdane surveyed over 3,000 active AI users in Europe, asking which types of products they’ve researched using AI. The results reveal a clear hierarchy of where AI shines:
Travel (28%) – AI helps users plan trips, compare flight options, and pick destinations
Electronics (26%) – Complex specs and fast innovation make this a natural AI use case
DIY (23%) – Users consult AI for product comparisons, tools, and how-tos
In contrast, categories like fashion (10%), real estate (6%), and cleaning services (4%) see minimal AI involvement. That’s not just a trend—it reflects how tangible, tactile, or taste-driven categories still resist full digital translation.
🏁 Why It Matters?
Let’s break it down. The categories topping the AI chart are:
Expensive
Research-heavy
Online-first
Driven by specs, logistics, or planning
These are the ideal battlegrounds for conversational AI to flex its muscles. If you sell in one of these sectors and your product isn’t LLM-optimized—you’re already behind.
Here’s what this means for businesses:
In travel, AI replaces search engines, blogs, even agents. Brands must ensure their offers show up in LLMs when users ask “What’s the best 7-day trip in Europe under €1,000?”
In electronics, AI helps narrow choices based on specs and budgets. Your product descriptions, reviews, and feature lists better be clean, structured, and digestible by AI
In DIY, expect AI to play both advisor and recommender—users want tips, comparisons, and product pairings
Meanwhile, fashion, beauty, pets, and cleaning have lower AI usage because:
People want to touch or try before buying
Preferences are more personal and less spec-based
AI still struggles with taste, style, and subjective nuance
That doesn’t mean AI won’t catch up. But for now, if you’re in high-consideration categories like travel, electronics, DIY, or even finance, your AI game needs to be strong.
📦 Pro Tip for Brands
Structure your product data
Optimize for natural-language queries
Create real customer content that AI can surface
Be the answer to “What’s best for me?”
The AI shopping revolution isn’t coming—it’s already sorted your vacation and told you which drill to buy.
🎓 Found this insightful?
📩 Get free weekly news and insights, subscribe to the MarketMaze newsletter
📈 Join the MarketMaze+ Platform to access hundreds of insights like this, resources, and exclusive reports with detailed sources and links
📘 Understand retail media with our 60+ pg white paper or marketplace landscape with our 300+ Marketplace database
🔬 Ask for on-demand insight or report to make better decisions. Reach out here.
📖 Data Source
Name: Only for MarketMaze+ subscribers
Publish date: Only for MarketMaze+ subscribers
Region: Only for MarketMaze+ subscribers
Method: Only for MarketMaze+ subscribers
Link to source: Only for MarketMaze+ subscribers
See raw data from the chart below 👇 ((Only for MarketMaze+ subscribers)
Subscribe to MarketMaze+ to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber to get access to all insights with sources and other subscriber-only content.
Try it now