Agentic Commerce: What does it mean for brands, customers and SEO teams?
By Jon Earnshaw|01 Nov 2026|10 min read
Agentic commerce is shopping where AI agents do the work on a person's behalf: finding products, comparing options, checking the details and, increasingly, completing the purchase. Instead of a human searching, clicking and buying on a website, a customer's personal agent talks to a brand's business agent, and the decision can happen inside a conversation.
Transactions are moving away from websites and into conversations across AI surfaces. That's no longer a prediction. The infrastructure exists, and in the US people can already buy inside Google's AI Mode and Gemini.
At Pi we've been predicting the emergence of conversational search for many years. Now AI agents are working their way into those conversations, and for every online business that is a call to action that can't be ignored.
So in this post I'll cover what agentic commerce actually is, where the protocols and products stand today, what it does to SEO (especially ecommerce SEO), and what you can do now.
What is Agentic Commerce?
For as long as we've had search engines, humans have searched, clicked blue links, made decisions and bought things. Agentic commerce changes who does that work. Autonomous AI agents handle the interactions, and a consumer's own personal agent (Google's Gemini Spark is an early example) can communicate directly with a brand's business agent to have the conversation and complete the purchase.
Watch the short explainer below:
As I put it in that short, business agents are going to be the brand's trusted voice, the voice of reason. And when personal agents start talking to them, that's where the transaction will happen: inside that walled garden, potentially without even a visit to a website.
Agentic AI vs agentic commerce
The two terms get used interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. Agentic AI is the broad capability: AI that can pursue a goal, plan steps, use tools and take actions rather than just answer a question. Agentic commerce is one application of it, focused on buying and selling. If you want the wider picture, read our explainer, What is agentic AI?
Where agentic commerce stands in late 2026
When this post first went out in January, a lot of this was still announcements. Ten months on, here's what has actually happened and what hasn't.
OpenAI and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). OpenAI and Stripe launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, powered by ACP, in September 2025. In March 2026 OpenAI changed course. It said the first version of Instant Checkout didn't offer the flexibility it wanted to provide, so merchants now use their own checkout while ChatGPT focuses on product discovery. ACP lives on as the layer merchants use to share product feeds and promotions with ChatGPT. OpenAI named Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe's, Best Buy, The Home Depot and Wayfair as integrated for discovery, and Shopify merchants' products come in through Shopify Catalog. The ACP specification is still marked beta and is maintained by OpenAI and Stripe. As of October 2026, OpenAI's merchant page says shopping is live for ChatGPT users in the US and purchases are completed on merchants' own websites or apps.
Google and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Google launched UCP on 11 January 2026 at the National Retail Federation show. It was co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, and endorsed by more than 20 others including Macy's, Best Buy, Mastercard, Visa, Stripe and Zalando. UCP is an open standard that covers the whole journey, from discovery and buying to post-purchase support, and it works alongside Agent2Agent (A2A), the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It powers a buy button on eligible product listings in AI Mode and Gemini, and the retailer stays the merchant of record. In September 2026 Google said UCP already enables direct checkout for hundreds of thousands of brands and retailers, and added a UCP integration hub in Merchant Center with cart transfer to the merchant's site and checkout testing. It is rolling out in the US first, with Australia and Canada to follow early in 2027.
Google's agentic checkout and Universal Cart. Separately, Google's agentic checkout (rolled out in the US in November 2025) can buy a tracked product on the merchant's own site, with the shopper's confirmation, when it hits a target price. On 15 October 2026 Google launched Universal Cart in the US: one cart across Search and the Gemini app that tracks price drops and restocks and checks out with Google Pay or hands the cart over to the retailer's site. Google named Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair and many Shopify merchants among the first stores.
Google's Business Agent. Google launched Business Agent on Search on 12 January 2026 with retailers including Lowe's, Michael's, Poshmark and Reebok. It's the branded agent I describe below: eligible US retailers switch it on and customize it in Merchant Center (Shopify stores can activate it through the Google & YouTube app). In September 2026 Google opened a beta that puts Business Agent inside YouTube ads in the US, and made AI performance insights in Merchant Center generally available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India, so retailers can see their share of voice in AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Amazon, Perplexity and Shopify. Google isn't the only one. In May 2026 Amazon combined Rufus and Alexa+ into Alexa for Shopping for US customers; its Buy for Me feature can complete a purchase from another retailer's site on the shopper's behalf for eligible products. Perplexity and PayPal launched Instant Buy for US users in November 2025, with the retailer as merchant of record. And Shopify's agentic storefronts make eligible stores' products available in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta, with checkout inside the AI channel on some of them.
Personal agents. Google announced Gemini Spark, which it describes as a personal AI agent that works 24/7, on 19 May 2026. Because it runs in the cloud, it keeps working after you close your laptop. On 30 July 2026 Google extended it to AI Pro subscribers in more than 160 more countries, but as of late October 2026 Google's help pages still exclude the UK, the European Economic Area, Switzerland and Nigeria.
What this means if you sell in the UK. Most of the checkout features above are US first. Google's Merchant Center help says UCP-powered checkout applies to products eligible in the United States, Canada and Australia, and that it's only available for select merchants for now. Google's own roadmap names Australia and Canada next, for early 2027, and gives no UK date. Business Agent is US only, and AI performance insights in Merchant Center isn't yet offered in the UK. Payments are moving faster: in March 2026 Visa launched its Agentic Ready program in Europe, including the UK, with issuers such as Barclays, HSBC UK, Nationwide, Revolut and Santander testing agent-initiated payments, and Mastercard has offered Agent Pay since April 2025. So for UK teams the immediate job is visibility and data readiness, not plugging in a buy button.
Plan for several platforms, not one. When I went through this with Sam Hailstone in our March webinar, he called it "a protocol land grab." He also warned against preparing for agentic commerce as if it were a single shift, because it isn't one. Each platform has its own rails, so for most teams it's a question of prioritization and, crucially, resourcing. Payments are part of it. If your payment provider isn't on the right rails, Sam said, agents can recommend you but can't complete the transaction. Some platform details from that session have since changed (OpenAI's checkout, for one). The point stands.
From pages to protocols to agents
The big shift is architectural. In our February webinar I called it the big collapse. Google had the discovery, retailers owned the evaluation and the payment providers owned the checkout, but now it’s all collapsed into one conversational surface.
Yesterday’s stack:
- Website (CMS + checkout)
- Analytics
- Organic search (plus ads) driving sessions to pages
The stack that’s now being built:
- Open protocols for agentic commerce (ACP, UCP) that define the “language” between agents, merchants and payment providers
- AI surfaces (Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT etc.) that host the conversations
- Business agents that represent your brand on these surfaces
- Personal agents that represent the customer, orchestrating what to buy, from whom, and under what constraints
Personal agents will become the digital proxies for human intent: the software that people speak to, delegate tasks to and TRUST with their financial credentials. Think of a personal agent as a mode of interaction within an existing ecosystem. Business agents can even generate real-time offers based on intent, turning pricing into a dynamic, negotiable element.
Websites remain important, but they are no longer the only place where buying decisions happen.
Ecommerce agents: business agents and personal agents
An ecommerce agent is an AI agent that takes on shopping tasks. Pi’s glossary describes an AI agent as a digital companion with built-in skills, like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude, that you can give tasks to and hand authority and responsibility. In commerce there are two kinds, and they arrive at different speeds.
Business agents: your new digital storefront. Business agents act as branded AI staff on surfaces such as Google Search, Gemini and ChatGPT. They draw on your Merchant Center data, website content and commerce protocols to answer questions, guide purchases and drive checkout around the clock. They can advise on products and compare options, guide configuration, bundles and financing, and support post-purchase needs like returns, warranty extensions and reorders.
Put simply, as I said in my February webinar, a business agent is nothing more than a conversational experience inside Google Search and Gemini that lets any customer chat with your brand.
Some are already out in the wild. In our July webinar I showed Macy’s assistant, Ask Macy’s. It was so good that people didn’t just like it, they spent more: according to Google Cloud, revenue per visit was roughly 4.75 times higher among customers who used Ask Macy’s during beta testing. For a brand, the model is simple. You claim your agent in Merchant Center, tell it who it is, and link it to the right information through an MCP layer. Watch me walk through it at 15:04.
Personal agents represent the buyer: storing preferences, payment details and recurring tasks, and operating across AI platforms and devices while talking to any compatible business agent through open protocols. They are taking longer, and for a good reason. As I said in the same webinar, delegating search is easy, but delegating a decision takes time. People are happy to let something narrow down options for them. Handing over their money, their taste and their style is a different matter.
When personal agents do arrive, they won’t shop one brand at a time. As I put it in February, your personal agent isn’t having a conversation with one business agent, it’s having it with several. If your business agent can’t answer a question about, say, compatible accessories, the personal agent will switch to the next one.
Strategic implications for businesses
- Compressed buying journey – discovery, evaluation, and checkout can happen in one conversation.
- Shifted control – you do not control the surface where decisions are made, but you remain the merchant of record.
- Execution matters – stock accuracy, fulfillment, and support quality become key signals, because agents optimize for reliability and trust.
The agentic commerce protocols: ACP, UCP and MCP
| What it is | Who is behind it | Where it shows up today | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) | Open standard for how AI agents and businesses exchange product feeds, carts, checkout and delegated payments | Maintained by OpenAI and Stripe (beta) | Product discovery in ChatGPT; checkout through merchants’ own sites and ChatGPT apps |
| UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol) | Open standard for the full shopping journey across agents, businesses and payment providers | Google, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart | Buy button and Universal Cart in AI Mode and Gemini (US first) |
| MCP (Model Context Protocol) | A way for an AI agent to connect securely to a data source or tool | Open standard used across the industry | Behind business agents, and in tools like Pi’s own MCP server |
Underpinning both commerce protocols is MCP: a standardized way to expose structured data, like product details and return policies, to AI agents securely, instead of relying on fragile scraping. Our glossary calls it a USB for AI. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is designed to work with MCP, and that’s where a business agent can pull detailed product information or check whether someone is already a customer. For more on how MCP works, read What is an MCP?
What agentic commerce means for SEO (especially ecommerce)
SEO was never just about keywords. It was about showing up, being understood, and getting chosen when someone wants to get something done. Agentic commerce doesn’t replace SEO; it changes what SEO is for.
In AI-driven shopping, agents handle multi-step tasks and clarify ambiguous intent. Customers no longer search for “best running shoes for flat feet.” Instead, agents guide them through conversations, narrowing options, checking stock, and even completing purchases. This is also why questions such as “what prompts should I be tracking for LLMs?” are becoming increasingly difficult to answer, as visibility is shaped by entire conversations rather than individual prompts.
For SEO, the goal shifts from ranking pages to making your brand:
- Eligible for the agent’s candidate set
- Understood with accurate, structured data
- Trusted with strong reviews, clear policies, and reliable operations
- Chosen through compelling offers and effective agent performance
New ranking factors include:
- Protocol and feed eligibility – implement ACP or UCP, keep product feeds complete, consistent, and up to date.
- Structured knowledge and policies – make shipping, returns, warranties, sizing, and ingredients machine-readable.
- Trust and performance signals – reviews, customer service metrics, stock accuracy, and fulfillment speed.
- Agent performance – how often your Business Agent converts conversations to orders, handles questions, and resolves issues.
SEO’s role expands from page optimization to commerce graph optimization across AI surfaces, including web search, AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini, and marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart. In my own planning notes I put it this way: “SEO will move upstream from getting content ranked to making business truth legible to machines.”
Practically, SEOs become schema and protocol leads, conversation strategists and measurement translators, shaping how agents interact with your brand and reporting on AI-driven visibility and conversions. You can already measure part of this. Pi’s AI Shopping Tracker separates seller recommendations from product listings in AI answers, so you can see whether your business is suggested as the seller, not just whether your product appears. My colleague Peter Longton explained why that matters in his brightonSEO talk this October: if a purchase journey happens without human involvement, the recommended seller is likely to be the one the agent makes the deal with. And to see how your brand performs across whole conversations, not single answers, Pi’s AI Authority Score brings it into one benchmark against your competitors.
The businesses that get this right will move beyond the old “SEO versus PPC” debate and instead focus on eligibility and performance across all AI surfaces.
What ecommerce businesses need to do now
In this short, I outline the three things to strengthen first: your data, your content and your trust signals. The five steps below show how to put that into practice.
1. Get on the rails
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2. Make your business agent-ready
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3. Build a first-generation Business Agent
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4. Re-tool SEO for agentic commerce
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5. Scenario-plan for the future
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The future of ecommerce: from websites to agents
Agentic commerce is not just a new channel; it is a change in the fundamental physics of commerce. For two decades, the main constraint on digital commerce was human attention. In the agentic era, the constraint is machine trust.
As transactions move from websites to conversations, and from conversations to background negotiations between agents, the businesses that thrive will be the ones that build the most robust, transparent and standardized data infrastructure. The website stops being the only destination and becomes the publication layer for the data that feeds the agents.
The timeline has moved more slowly than the January headlines suggested. Checkout inside AI is live in the US (in Google, Perplexity and Amazon) but limited to eligible merchants and products, OpenAI has stepped back from native checkout to focus on discovery, and personal agents like Gemini Spark aren’t yet available in the UK. But the rails are in place, and the brands preparing their data, policies and content now are the ones agents will be able to evaluate when it counts.
So, what do we need to do now?
In short:
- Get onto the new commerce rails (ACP, UCP) early.
- For a business to be truly “Agent-Ready” in 2026, implementing an MCP server is arguably more important than optimizing a mobile site.
- Treat Business Agents as the next generation of “front-of-house”, not a bolt-on chatbot.
- Evolve SEO from “rank pages” to “optimize the entire commerce graph for agents and conversations”.
- Use this moment to clean your data, tighten your operations and make your brand’s value proposition machine-legible.
- Schema is no longer an option as agents will rely on structured data to verify claims. For example, if a product page says “sustainable” in text but lacks the corresponding GS1 sustainability certification in the schema, the agent will likely discard the claim as unverified ‘marketing fluff’.
- A critical “Trust Signal” for agents is the machine-readability of the return policy. Agents look for the
MerchantReturnPolicyschema. If this is missing or ambiguous, the agent – programmed to minimize risk – will disqualify the vendor from the consideration set.
The brands that do this first won’t just survive the shift from websites to agents; they’ll be the ones the agents keep picking, again and again, when it really matters – at the moment of decision.
There is obviously a lot more that can be done right now. We’ll be covering this off in our upcoming webinars, simply because the pace of change is happening so quickly.
At Pi, we provide expert strategic guidance on agentic commerce and how to get the most from the Pi platform. Our team works with brands on agentic search optimization, helping businesses prepare their data, protocols and AI visibility so agents can discover, understand and recommend their products.
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