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