Agentic Commerce: Leveraging AI as a Direct Shopping Channel

How can brands structure their SEO programs, website content, product pages, and checkout to capitalize on agentic commerce, meeting consumers in AI apps and search?

AI as a direct shopping channel is quickly gaining steam: from Microsoft’s Copilot Merchant Program, Amazon’s “Buy for Me,” Perplexity’s new in-line purchase functionality (which can now connect to any ecommerce merchant via firmly.ai’s API), and OpenAI bringing merchant shopping directly to ChatGPT.

These innovations allow shoppers to discover and buy from brands, without ever having to leave the AI app or search engine. To illustrate, Perplexity’s AI-powered search engine can now feature product information, prices, and shipping costs. Similarly, ChatGPT-Shopify integration could enable users to see customer reviews, prices, and shipping, as well as checkout directly within ChatGPT via a “buy now” button. On April 28th, ChatGPT launched experimental AI-powered shopping, featuring improved product results, visual product details, reviews, pricing, and direct links to buy.

Considerations for Brands

As consumers increasingly interact with AI apps and search engines for information, we are seeing slight declines in traditional organic search and direct website traffic. AI search is still largely focused on answers, but commerce is coming fast. To prepare, brands should:

• Understand Customer Intent: No matter the next shiny thing in digital marketing, understanding your customer never fails to be the foundation for success. In the case of AI shopping, it’s about interpreting how your audience searches for/wants to find information and products/services, and the technology that best connects them to what they need (e.g. how is your customer using AI?).
• Prioritize Content: Once you understand customer intent around AI shopping, focus on creating experiences/content that align to that intent. This includes informative content that answers questions directly and comprehensively, as prioritized by LLM models powering AI search. In particular, think “conversational”; write like a human answering a question.
• Optimize Accessibility & Discoverability: Search engine indexation is a central tenet of traditional SEO, and AI search is no different. Ensure that your products are easily accessible for AI models to understand. While AI search employs different reasoning to deliver results based on user queries, it still relies on data scraping and organization. Elements like schema markup for better context and optimization of technical signals remain crucial for surfacing your content/products in AI channels. This includes having good data hygiene around product information and elements like FAQs.
• Enable Platform Integration: Depending on the platform, there are steps that must be taken to “show up” in AI search. For Perplexity’s “Buy with Pro,” this includes signing up to be a merchant partner, as well as integrating to Perplexity’s catalog API to better list your products, or integrating with firmly.ai’s API. Similar steps will be required in the ChatGPT-Shopify integration as this capability becomes available. Furthermore, to streamline AI shopping experiences, brands should enable rapid-buy features like Shopify Shop Pay one-click checkout. And Sponsored Ads are likely on the way for ChatGPT, which will require advertisers to set up paid product feeds much like Google Shopping.

Ultimately, AI shopping success hinges on having a deep understanding of your audience, providing useful content, and ensuring that this content is technically accessible. AI search is experimental and evolving quickly; brands should always prioritize building lasting value rather than chasing quick wins, which is the tendency with every new technology.

At Astound Digital, we can provide a proactive audit and strategy on how to build, structure and deliver your content to AI apps and search engines as your customers transition to a more LLM-focused discoverability and shopping landscape. Reach out today to set up a conversation with our experts!