June 1, 2026
The way consumers are discovering products online is changing. Instead of sifting through pages of blue links, people are turning to more conversational tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot to do their shopping research. The result is a new era - agentic commerce. And this shift from traditional browsing to one where artificial intelligence handles the research, comparison, and purchasing on the user’s behalf has triggered a huge change for one major ecommerce platform.
Shopify recently rolled out a major set of agentic commerce features and is now starting to auto-generate new files designed to help AI agents understand and interact with your store. But what does this mean for you? Let’s explore.
Shopify has rolled out a number tools built straight into the backend of your store:
Currently, only US customers can buy directly through ChatGPT from a small group of suppliers, such as Etsy. However, we expect the UK to gain this feature soon.
There’s almost no doubt that agentic commerce will land in the UK soon. What we don’t know is whether agentic shopping will actually take off for transactions or whether people will continue to use it purely as a research tool.
The consumers conducting thorough research into a product are typically looking at higher-ticket items. When spending a significant amount of money, are shoppers going to actually trust that AI will find them the best deal, and then feel okay handing over their credit card details?
On top of this, AI currently struggles to keep pace with Google’s almost instantaneous index of the internet. It’s not uncommon for an AI engine to surface 404 errors or recommend out of stock items.
That being said, people are using AI to find and research products. So, regardless of whether people keep it as a research tool or leverage its every capability, it’s important to prepare for what the future of ecommerce could be.
Your organic SEO performance has a huge influence on your AI search visibility. Traditional marketing tactics, such as PR and link building, remain critical. But, there are some technical nuances that should also be considered. While some of these optimisation techniques are still emerging and not yet standardised, for most brands, they are worth considering.
Since Shopify creates these files automatically, your current one is generic. Manually edit your agents.md file to highlight your USPs and give AI crawlers more context to your brand, so bots can pitch your brand identity more accurately.
You could implement an agents.md file if you don’t have a Shopify store. But it’s important to bear in mind that all of this is pretty new, and there are still some conflicting opinions about this among SEO professionals.
AI models use customer reviews as a key signal of trust and quality. Many retailers use third-party review widgets that inject data using client-side JavaScript. Google can see this fine, but AI crawlers like ChatGPT and Claude can’t as they don’t run JavaScript, so they may think you have zero reviews.
AI models crawl product pages for specific information. Descriptive copy with precise specifications, materials, and use cases is crucial. But you can also take it one step further and build product-level FAQ sections, answering likely questions, to increase your chances of earning a citation. Offering explicit answers gives AI engines the exact data points required to confidently recommend you over your competitor.
Whether you like it or not, agentic commerce is something you need to get ready for. The files are already live on your server, and the brands that optimise them first are the ones that are more likely to see success.
There are plenty of discussions and differences of opinions over emerging AI features. But there is one thing that most SEOs can agree on - your AI visibility is massively shaped by your traditional organic search visibility, so a solid SEO strategy will take you a long way.
If you need expert help navigating agentic commerce or building a solid SEO strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.
