Deal.ai froze a random basket before the sales began and checks every store’s price at the same time each day through Cyber Monday
Every November, shoppers face the same question: is this deal actually good, or just labeled that way? Deal.ai, an AI shopping agent built by Famous Labs, is answering it with data, one product at a time.
A basket frozen before the sales
On November 5, 2026, before any Black Friday price was out, Deal.ai locked in 972 products chosen at random from a saved seed. The basket covers what people actually buy on Black Friday: TVs, laptops, headphones, vacuums, kitchen and small home appliances, toys, video games, smartwatches and tablets. Each product has a brand and a model number or barcode, so it can be matched exactly across stores.
Freezing the list first means no one, Deal.ai included, can swap in products that make a better headline once the sales start. The rules for what counts as a real price drop were also published before collection began.
Same time, every store, every day
Each product has a fixed check time between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Eastern and keeps it every day. Every check reads all the stores listing the product at one moment, so no store gets an extra chance to catch a low price.
A separate AI model then reads each store’s own listing title, with prices hidden, and keeps only the identical item: same model, size, capacity, pack count and generation. In an earlier recheck, only 1,886 of 4,990 store listings passed that test.
“Finding prices is the easy part. The hard part is making sure every store is selling the exact same product, the same model and the same size,” said Alex Mehr, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Famous Labs, the company behind Deal.ai. “That’s what our agents are built to check, so shoppers can trust the price comparison they see.”
What the early data shows
Deals come and go fast. Three weeks before Black Friday, Target, Best Buy and Kohl’s all had a Shark Stratos vacuum at half price, $264.99. Within three days, all three were back to $529.99.
The gaps between stores are large even outside sale days. In a separate study of 24,394 identical products at 16 major U.S. retailers, the price at one store picked at random averaged 15.6% above the lowest listed price. Checking three stores cut that gap to 3.7%.
What shoppers can use now
- Plain-English search: ask for what you need; the agent researches options and compares live prices across thousands of stores.
- Deals without searching: agents run hourly and surface unusually good deals, each with a deal score out of 10.
- Deal checker: paste a link to any deal to see the same item at every big store.
- Price history and alerts: price history where available, plus price-drop alerts.
Deal.ai is free at deal.ai. The Black Friday study updates daily at deal.ai/research.
About Deal.ai
Deal.ai is an AI shopping agent that compares prices across thousands of stores and sends shoppers to the retailer to buy. It is built by Famous Labs, a Miami-based AI research team whose products also include Famous.ai and Supercool. Deal.ai earns a commission from some stores when shoppers buy through its links.