For the European beauty retailer Douglas (2025 revenue: €4.58 billion, up by 3.5%), with one-third of online sales, traffic coming from LLM is becoming increasingly important, with differences by countries. During an interview with mind Retail at Shoptalk Europe, Chief Marketing Officer Rik Strubel explains the drivers behind this trend.
LLMs and agentic commerce are one of the major topics at Shoptalk Europe. For Douglas, what share of traffic comes from LLMs for and how far could it grow?
At the beginning of June 2026, less than 1% of total traffic to our product pages came from AI search engines. However, growth has not been linear. Between August and September 2025, this traffic almost doubled, linked to the launch of Google AI Mode and an algorithm change at OpenAI. Since September 2025, traffic has grown steadily until April 2026, when it suddenly dropped back to September levels. After investigation, we found that this was caused by a new change in OpenAI’s algorithm.
It is clear that this traffic will continue to grow, but it is difficult to make precise forecasts.
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Article authors
Sophie Baqué
Chief Editor of mind Retail