Black Friday 2025 was the largest discovery day ever on Constructor’s platform, with 2.27 billion total discovery requests across search, autosuggest, browse, and recommendations.
But beyond the headline number, this year’s data revealed deeper structural changes in how shoppers seem to be navigating Black Friday.
Below is a deeper dive into the most interesting trends we noticed across geographies, traffic sources, query types, and more.
When we analyzed sustained platform-wide traffic, two distinct patterns emerged: a clear US peak with a steady ramp, and a longer, flatter EU “season.”
US traffic rose in clear, steady stages before reaching a concentrated high point on Black Friday. The shape of the curve was defined by a gradual build-up until the holiday, where the peak more than doubled the seasonal average.
Here’s how the exact progression looked in a representative sample:
In summary, the 2025 data showed that Black Friday itself remained the major inflection point, producing a substantial jump in traffic that far exceeded the steady increases leading up to it.
In contrast, EU traffic rose gradually through late October and November before reaching a smaller, more distributed peak on Black Friday. Instead of a single concentrated surge, the curve stretched across several weeks.
Looking at a representative sample:
The relative lift underscores the shape of this curve: only 20–25 percent above the late-November average, even though activity nearly doubled compared to late October.
In summary, the 2025 data showed that Europe experienced Black Friday as a multi-week event, with traffic distributed across an extended promotional window rather than concentrated in a single day.
In 2025, the overwhelming share of traffic landing on product detail pages came from the same long-standing sources as previous years. Facebook, Google, and Instagram were the dominant entry points by a wide margin, far outpacing every other referral channel.
Inside that hierarchy, one result stood out simply because it didn’t match expectations: ChatGPT ranked 15th globally as a PDP traffic source. Given the attention around AI-assisted shopping, many assumed it would break into the top group. The volume was meaningful but nowhere close to the levels driven by the established platforms that have shaped upstream discovery for a decade.
We suspect this gap exists because many shoppers may be using ChatGPT as an initial research tool without clicking through its suggested links, and then navigating directly to the retailer once they know what they want.
In previous years, we observed promo-related searches (“sale,” “promo,” “offers,” “deal,” and similar terms) spike during Black Friday and Christmas. The 2025 Black Friday dataset showed the same underlying pattern, but with three notable details:
Black Friday concentrated promo intent
During the event, “black friday” became the top promo-related term, with “sale” close behind. The shift was sharp and dominated the broader promo vocabulary that typically builds through the fall.
Promo language varied significantly by category
Our analysis also revealed that shoppers searched for deals differently depending on what they were shopping for:
A note on personalization
The data showed that conversion-to-click on promo requests was three times higher than on non-sale requests. This mattered most when shoppers used natural-language promo terms that didn’t appear verbatim in product data. Retailers whose systems could interpret these requests were better positioned to capture the lift, because more of those high-intent queries surfaced relevant results.
Taken together, the 2025 data showed a surge in promo interest that was both highly concentrated and highly variable, with category-specific language shaping how deal-seeking shoppers reached products.