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June 23, 2026

AI agents are starting to do the shopping. Here's what it means for your store.

Something quietly changed in how people shop online this year. A growing number of them don't start at Google, or at your homepage. They open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot and ask a question like "What's the best all-mountain snowboard for an intermediate rider under $600?" — and the AI answers with specific products. Sometimes it lets them buy without ever visiting a store.

That's what people mean by agentic commerce: AI agents that don't just answer questions but do the shopping — discovering, comparing, and increasingly buying on a person's behalf. It sounds abstract until you notice what it actually changes: the AI, not your website, is now often the first thing standing between your products and a buyer.

This is real, not hype

The direction is clear even if you discount the forecasts. Shopify reports that AI-driven traffic to its stores has grown roughly eightfold over the past year, with orders from AI searches rising even faster. Adobe has measured AI-referred traffic to US retailers climbing several hundred percent year over year — and those shoppers convert at least as well as visitors from ordinary search. McKinsey pegs the agentic commerce opportunity in the trillions by 2030. You don't have to believe every number to see where this is going.

What it means if you sell things that take explaining

If your customers ask questions before they buy — fit, sizing, which model, what works with what — two shifts matter most.

Visibility now depends on being understood, not on being loud. When someone asks an AI for a recommendation, the AI chooses based on how well it understands your products: clear titles, real specs, who each product is for. Not your ad budget, not SEO tricks. A thin product page gets skipped. A well-described one gets recommended.

The sales conversation is moving. The thing that makes a good shop great — someone who knows the gear and helps each person find the right fit — is exactly what these AI shoppers are trying to do for the customer. If your store can have that conversation, with a person or with their AI agent, you win sales that otherwise go to whoever can.

What you can do this week — for free

You can start without spending anything.

  1. Turn on what you already have. If you're on Shopify, you may already have native AI features — a storefront assistant, agentic sales channels — sitting switched off or unconfigured. Check your admin. (They're rolling out in stages and US-first, so you may or may not see them yet; look anyway.)
  2. Fix your product data. Open your three best sellers and ask: from what's written, could a stranger — or an AI — tell who this is for, what size to get, and what it pairs with? If not, add it. Nothing else moves your AI visibility more.
  3. Fill in your policies and FAQs. AI agents read your shipping, returns, and FAQ pages to answer questions like "do they offer free returns?" Empty pages mean the AI can't vouch for you.
  4. Write for the question, not the keyword. The old game was stuffing keywords. The new one is answering the real questions a buyer asks. The pages that clearly answer "which one is right for me?" are the ones AI surfaces.

The part that's genuinely hard

Here's the catch most retailers hit. The knowledge that actually helps someone choose — fit, sizing, what pairs with what, the honest trade-off between two similar models — usually lives in your head and your staff's, not on your product pages. A generic AI can read your catalog. It can't know your gear the way you do.

Closing that gap — giving every shopper, and every AI agent, the knowledgeable conversation your best salesperson would have — is the problem we're building Sqrly to solve. But you don't need us to begin: the four steps above are yours to take today.

The bottom line

Agentic commerce isn't a wave you have to ride perfectly. It rewards the same thing good retail always has: actually knowing your products and helping people find the right one. The stores that make that knowledge legible — to people and to AI — are the ones that win the next few years.

Sqrly helps online retailers give every shopper and every AI agent a knowledgeable, on-brand sales conversation. Join the waitlist.