While technologists and political experts debate the impact of governments’ AI model reviews and staggered roll-outs, the foundation for the next economic growth era is being developed: Agentic Commerce. From humans going to a store to purchase items to shopping online, retail has undergone a massive shift over the past 20 years. Similarly, advertising has moved from print and out-of-home billboards to banner ads and commercial breaks when streaming your favorite songs on a free tier.
Ads and commercials have a simple goal. Whether it is the family memories you will make during the summer vacation, that new sporty car that shows you are moving up, or the medicine that makes embarrassing allergy symptoms a thing of the past, they are all built to trigger the viewer’s emotional reaction to take action. But what happens when the decision-making entity is no longer human, but an AI agent acting on the customer’s behalf?
I recall the early promise of intelligent agents replenishing a company’s raw materials when a certain threshold is reached about ten years ago. That vision evolved into personal assistants booking business trips, while taking team availability, travel locations, and preferences into account. The promise of software completing more complex transactions on your behalf is incredibly exciting.
OpenAI and Perplexity launched their agentic web browsers (Atlas and Comet) in 2025. In November, Amazon sued Perplexity, claiming that AI agents like Comet directly access its online store, thereby rendering ads useless. In March 2026, Amazon won the suit. Industry rival Anthropic ships a Chrome extension that lets Claude take screenshots to execute tasks on your desktop if an app cannot be natively controlled from within Claude (e.g., via Model Context Protocol or APIs).
OpenAI’s consumer focus offers a glimpse at what will likely follow in business. The partnerships that the company has struck with Walmart, Shopify, Etsy, and PayPal bring e-commerce and digital payments directly into ChatGPT. This enables ChatGPT customers to search for products and purchase them from within their AI conversation. OpenAI and its retail partners quickly realized, though, that Instant Checkout in ChatGPT was a suboptimal solution as ChatGPT was the place where customers checked out. Since then, Walmart has brought its own AI assistant, Sparky, into ChatGPT. It is directly linked to Walmart’s own systems, and Walmart owns the customer relationship again.
Since early February 2026, OpenAI has been rolling out ads to users on ChatGPT’s free tier. The company says users’ chats are not influenced by the ad that will be shown, and their prompts are not shared with the advertiser. Nonetheless, displaying ads for limited consumer tiers gives a glimpse of where we are headed—and if there is a market in B2C, there will certainly also be one for B2B.
If agents can transact on their user’s behalf, even from within a chat session, and contextual information is used to display ads, (a) what factors influence an agent’s decision to recommend a particular product or service, and (b) what can companies do to ensure theirs is the one being recommended?
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Commerce has been engineered around one moment: the click. Agentic commerce removes it. As humans hand discovery, comparison, and purchase to AI agents, the brand that is not legible to a machine won’t be considered. Attendees play through Andreas Welsch’s interactive Agent of Commerce simulation, guiding AI agents to shop, sell, and settle in real time and tapping to decode each layer as it happens. Andreas uses his Five Gates to Agentic Commerce™ framework to turn the experience into a readiness assessment attendees can run on their own business before the buyer is an agent.
For the past 25 years, companies have sought to have their website appear as close to the top as possible in Google search results. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become its own subdomain in marketing, focused on including relevant keywords and phrases in content that make it easier for Google’s web crawlers to ingest and process. But the AI assistants and agents don’t work based on keywords alone.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) have quickly emerged as new ways of making information available to AI assistants and agents. Providing an llms.txt file, JSON-formatted schema, and FAQs are some of the strategies for AI agents to find and process your website. (I wrote about them in an issue a few weeks ago.) Some companies even provide markdown versions of their websites for AI agents to process. In May 2026, Google Search Analyst John Mueller shared that this approach can be especially helpful for coding agents to process documentation, but the practice is rather a temporary crutch.
While GEO/AEO work as an organic approach, as a leader, you will want your business listed among the top recommendations (ideally, the number one spot) and make recommendations, or have your customers’ agent buy your product. But here is the challenge: traditional ads are geared to influence humans. AI agents do not have emotions, and neither longing for an unforgettable family vacation nor alleviating allergy symptoms mean much to an agent. Instead, otherwise rational AI agents are influenced by signals like authority (hello SEO deja-vu), FAQs, and results that appear in an AI vendor’s search index.
Google announced Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard designed for the future of commerce, empowering you to turn AI interactions into instant sales. UCP enables merchants to use the native checkout in Google’s AI Mode among other options. While it is a rather new protocol, openness and adoption by the ecosystem will determine its scale and market penetration.
What you can do today: Ask your marketing team to start building authority through content on your own web properties as well as on third-party properties such as media outlets. Incorporate GEO/AEO into your content strategy and ensure machine-readable versions of your webpage and llms.txt file exist. Generate a list of search intents/ questions and strategically answer them in your content. Measure over 1-2 quarters if your business is being listed as the top recommendation in AI searches.
The fact that fewer humans will see and act upon ads is disrupting the business model of internet giants such as Google, Amazon, and Meta. In the near future, you will see a new business model of agentic advertising emerging. AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have more control over ads and which ones their AI agents take action on. I expect that we will see a combination of audio-visual ads to get humans’ attention in the first place, and a second layer of ads to sway AI agents one way or another when they execute the user’s intent.
I started writing this article back in June. The first examples of agentic ads were just reported. TIME has added ads in the markdown (plain text) version of their website to influence agents’ responses. AI lab Perplexity discovered this approach and currently blocks these ads from being served. The main concern is websites influencing agents’ recommendations and actions. That means the concepts in this article are no longer theoretical and are already being actively applied in practice.
For both businesses and consumers, a key question becomes: how do you know that a response your agent processes is not just given to influence a buying decision?
What you can do today: Add markup information to your llms.txt or website. Below are two examples for a manufacturing company (with copy in {} to be replaced with actual data). When an AI agent looks for authoritative information about your company or product and reads the markdown information, it will incorporate it in its response to the user. Just as before, testing the effectiveness over time remains key as the changes will not show an effect immediately.
A — Advertising approach (manipulative)
B — Moderated approach (objective)
Agentic advertising is the next evolution of influencing decisions. It’s just that now, digital actors (agents) are researching products and services, and authority outweighs emotions. While vendors like OpenAI and Google are advancing their standards and protocols, leaders can already take the first steps to build the authority that AI agents and assistants rely on for their decision making. Over time, new business models and services around agentic advertising will emerge. As the technology evolves, users need to apply their own judgment to determine if an agent recommended an option because of objective data points or because a vendor placed a higher bid to have their product be listed as the top choice.
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