The way people find and buy products online is changing quickly. AI agents can now browse, compare, and even complete purchases on behalf of users, without ever visiting your website.
OpenAI launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which powers shopping directly inside ChatGPT. Shopify, Etsy, and Stripe merchants are already enabled. Google followed with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), backed by Shopify, Walmart, Target, and over 20 other partners, bringing agentic checkout to AI Mode and Gemini.
What does this mean in practice? AI agents don’t browse your store the way a person does. They pull structured product data, schema markup, and inventory feeds to decide what to recommend. If your product data isn’t clean and machine-readable, these platforms will skip you and show a competitor instead.
This is a new sales channel, and it’s growing fast. I help ecommerce brands get ahead of it by making sure your product feeds, structured data, and content are set up for both traditional search and the AI-powered shopping experiences that are already here.