Peak season has quietly changed shape
Cyber 5 2025 looked like another record on the surface: $44.2B spent over five days. But beneath the surface, shopping sessions fell every single day of the weekend, down as much as 16.6% year over year. Fewer shoppers came, each one worth more, and each one less forgiving of friction.
At the same time a second traffic peak appeared, between roughly 2 and 4 a.m., driven by shoppers arriving through ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity. Bottom-of-funnel intent, landing on product pages, at the hour your team is offline.
These trends are expected to continue this year. To get you prepped for Cyber 5 2026, we’ve created this new guide on how to handle changing shopper behaviors and AI-driven shopping trends.
In the guide you’ll discover:
- Why the 2025 session decline rewrote the math of peak, and what it means for how you prepare
- Where sites actually broke in 2025
- The overnight AI traffic pattern in full, hour by hour
- The gap between an alert firing and an issue resolved, and why that gap costs the most during the one week a backlog can’t absorb it
- A four-step 2026 peak playbook organized around what to fix, not what to watch
Download your guide today:
Get Started with Free Yottaa Insights
Yottaa Insights is built specifically for eCommerce brands, connecting the dots between site speed, third-party bloat, and shopper behavior so you can see exactly where performance is dragging down your business and where to focus for the biggest lift.
Install Yottaa Insights
