By Sachin Mohan · AIM Media House
During Costco's Q3 FY2026 earnings call on May 28, 2026, CFO Gary Millerchip confirmed that AI-sourced ecommerce traffic grew at a triple-digit rate in Q3 and carries the highest conversion rate of any traffic source on Costco's site.
Costco's site receives traffic from direct visits, organic search, paid search, social media, email, and now AI. Of all those channels, the traffic arriving from AI tools converts at the highest rate.
For a retailer that has spent decades building one of the most loyal membership bases in the world, that is a very strong signal.
"While the volume of traffic generated from AI search is still low, we saw triple digit growth in Q3, and this activity had the highest conversion rate of all traffic coming to our site," Millerchip said.
Updates From the Call The call contained three distinct AI disclosures, each addressing a different dimension of how Costco is thinking about AI's role in its ecommerce and merchandising strategy. The first is product page optimization.
Costco is using AI to enhance its product pages online to increase relevance with large language models, essentially making its listings more readable and rankable by the AI tools that consumers increasingly use to research products before buying.
The logic is specific: if an AI tool is going to recommend a product, it needs to be able to parse the full value proposition from the product page. Costco is investing in making that parsing easier. The second is personalization.
Costco's personalized product recommendation carousels delivered conversion rates three times better than typical site averages in Q3, and contributed just under $5 billion in ecommerce sales.
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