Agentic commerce, in plain English
The terms behind AI shopping, defined for a store owner rather than an engineer. Every entry has a real commerce example and what it means for your store.
Ecommerce basics
DTC / D2C (direct-to-consumer)
A model where a brand sells straight to shoppers through its own store, not through a retailer or marketplace.
Read definition →Merchant
The seller in a transaction: the store an AI agent evaluates and buys from on a shopper's behalf.
Read definition →Product catalog
The full structured list of everything a store sells, with each product's details.
Read definition →SKU (stock keeping unit)
Your store's own internal code for a product or variant. Not a global identifier.
Read definition →Product variant
A specific version of a product, like a size or color option, with its own price and availability.
Read definition →Product attribute
A single structured fact about a product, like material, color, or size. The fields agents compare on.
Read definition →Fundamentals
Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO)
Preparing your product data so AI shopping agents can read it, judge it, and act on it.
Read definition →Query fan-out
How an AI system turns one shopper question into many smaller searches, then combines the results.
Read definition →Retrieval
The step where an AI system fetches candidate products or sources before it writes an answer.
Read definition →Agentic commerce
Shopping carried out by an AI agent on a person's behalf: it finds, compares, and often buys for them.
Read definition →AI shopping
Using an AI assistant to research and buy products instead of a search engine and store visits.
Read definition →AI agents
Agentic AI
Software that acts on its own to reach a goal, taking multiple steps and using tools, not just answering a prompt.
Read definition →AI shopping agent
Software that finds, compares, and recommends real products for a shopper. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI all act as one.
Read definition →Optimization disciplines
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Writing and marking up content so an AI assistant can lift a clean, quotable answer and credit you.
Read definition →Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Getting AI systems to describe and suggest your brand accurately, whatever a shopper asks.
Read definition →Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO)
An umbrella term for shaping how large language models understand and represent your brand.
Read definition →E-E-A-T
Google's quality framework: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. AI engines weigh similar signals.
Read definition →Content grounding
Tying an AI system's answer to real source material so it quotes checkable facts instead of inventing them.
Read definition →AI hallucination
When a model states something false with confidence, like a wrong price or a made-up spec.
Read definition →Visibility and measurement
AI visibility
A measure of how often your brand or products appear in AI answers and recommendations.
Read definition →Prompt
The question a shopper gives an AI assistant; also the unit AI-visibility tools track.
Read definition →AI brand mention
Any time an AI assistant names your brand in an answer, with or without a link.
Read definition →AI citation
When an AI answer links to your page as a source. The main way AI sends you traffic.
Read definition →Share of voice
The portion of tracked AI answers in your category where your brand appears, versus competitors.
Read definition →Sentiment score
An estimate of whether an AI assistant describes your brand positively, neutrally, or negatively.
Read definition →Average position
Roughly where your product tends to land in an assistant's list of recommendations across many answers.
Read definition →AI visibility score
A single number a tool assigns to summarize how present your brand is across AI answers.
Read definition →AI traffic attribution
Identifying which visits and sales came from AI assistants, so you can treat AI as its own channel.
Read definition →Commerce protocols
Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)
OpenAI and Stripe's open standard for listing and selling products inside ChatGPT.
Read definition →Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
Google's open standard for agentic commerce across its shopping surfaces.
Read definition →Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Anthropic's open standard for connecting an AI agent to an external system's data and actions.
Read definition →Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
Google's open standard for letting an AI agent authorize and execute a payment on a shopper's behalf.
Read definition →Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A)
An open standard for letting independent AI agents communicate and hand tasks to each other.
Read definition →Visa Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP)
Visa's standard for verifying that an AI agent is trusted and authorized to make a payment.
Read definition →Shopping surfaces
Agentic storefront
A version of your store built for AI agents to read and buy from, not for people to browse.
Read definition →ChatGPT Shopping
The shopping experience inside ChatGPT, where the assistant recommends products with images, prices, and links.
Read definition →Google AI Mode and AI Overviews
Google's AI answer surfaces: the summaries atop search results, and the fuller conversational search mode.
Read definition →Agentic checkout
When an AI agent completes a purchase on a shopper's behalf, rather than the shopper checking out themselves.
Read definition →Perplexity Shopping
Perplexity's shopping features, where the assistant answers a buying question with product recommendations.
Read definition →Amazon Rufus
Amazon's AI shopping assistant inside the Amazon app and site.
Read definition →Instant Checkout
A feature that lets a shopper buy inside an AI assistant, without going to the store's site.
Read definition →Conversational commerce
Buying and selling through a back-and-forth conversation, now usually with an AI assistant.
Read definition →Zero-click buying
When a shopper buys without ever clicking through to a store's website.
Read definition →AI product recommendations
The specific products an AI assistant suggests in answer to a shopping question.
Read definition →AI shopping assistant
A consumer-facing AI that helps people shop: answering questions, comparing options, and recommending products.
Read definition →Product data
Product feed
A machine-readable list of your products and their key attributes that carries your catalog into shopping channels.
Read definition →Structured data
Machine-readable markup on your page that tells an agent exactly what something is: a product, its price, its availability.
Read definition →Product identifier (GTIN)
The global code that names your exact product so agents can match it across sites. Not your internal SKU.
Read definition →Google Merchant Center
Google's free tool where a store submits its product feed to power Shopping and AI shopping surfaces.
Read definition →JSON-LD
The format Google recommends for adding structured data: a small block of code that labels your product's facts.
Read definition →schema.org
The shared vocabulary that structured data uses to describe products, offers, and reviews the same way everywhere.
Read definition →Product data enrichment
Filling in and improving a product's data so agents can fully understand and compare it.
Read definition →Product feed optimization for AI shopping
Improving the data in your product feed so AI shopping surfaces rank and recommend your products more often.
Read definition →ChatGPT product feed
The structured catalog data a store sends to ChatGPT, defined by the Agentic Commerce Protocol.
Read definition →Google Shopping Graph
Google's constantly updated dataset of products, sellers, prices, and reviews from across the web.
Read definition →AI crawlers and indexing
AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot)
The bots that fetch web pages for AI systems. Most read your raw HTML and do not run JavaScript.
Read definition →robots.txt for AI crawlers
The file that decides whether AI crawlers are allowed to read your site at all.
Read definition →Training crawler
An AI crawler that gathers content to train future models, not to answer a live question.
Read definition →Retrieval crawler
An AI crawler that fetches pages to answer a shopper's question right now, like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
Read definition →Google-Extended
A robots.txt setting that controls whether Google may use your content to train and ground Gemini.
Read definition →llms.txt
A proposed file meant to guide AI models to your key content. Not a proven visibility lever.
Read definition →AI crawlability
How easily AI crawlers can reach and read your pages.
Read definition →