TL;DR
Agentic commerce lets AI agents discover, evaluate, and purchase products on behalf of shoppers. McKinsey projects between $3 and $5 trillion in AI-mediated commerce by 2030. Bain & Company forecasts $300-500 billion in U.S. agentic commerce alone.
AI agents parse structured data, not marketing copy. Product visibility now depends on machine-readable attributes, clean policies, and protocol compliance. If your catalog is not structured for machines, AI agents will skip you entirely.
Five platforms are driving this shift today: ChatGPT Shopping, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Amazon Rufus, and Microsoft Copilot. Each has distinct merchant integration paths.
Merchants who start with clean product data, structured schema markup, and Shopify's native agentic tools can be agent-ready within 30 days. The infrastructure is live. Setup is simpler than past channel shifts like mobile or voice commerce.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the discovery layer that feeds agentic commerce. If AI agents cannot find you, they cannot sell for you. 99% of URLs appearing in Google's AI Mode also rank in the top 20 organic results.