When shoppers ask AI what to buy, will your brand be the answer?
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A quiet shift is changing how people shop. Instead of opening a search engine and scrolling through links, shoppers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot what to buy. They describe what they need, and the assistant recommends specific products, compares options, and increasingly completes the purchase. The results page has become a conversation, and the brands named in that conversation win.
This is agentic commerce, and it is no longer a future scenario. Across Shopify's merchants, both traffic and orders from AI channels have tripled in the past year. More striking for smaller and specialist retailers: 75% of AI-driven purchases in the last quarter came from products outside the top 100 categories. AI does not only reward the biggest brands with the biggest budgets. It rewards the brands whose product information is clearest, most complete, and easiest for a machine to understand.
That last point is where most retailers are exposed. For twenty years, ecommerce teams have optimised for human eyes and for search engine crawlers. Agentic commerce asks a different question: can an AI agent read your catalogue, trust it, and confidently recommend it? If your product titles are vague, your descriptions thin, your attributes missing, or your data inconsistent across channels, the agent has nothing solid to work with, and it will recommend someone else.
Introducing Generative Engine Optimisation
The discipline emerging to solve this is Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO. Where search engine optimisation helped your pages rank in a list of links, GEO helps your products surface inside an AI-generated answer. The mechanics are different, but the principle is familiar: give the system rich, accurate, structured information, and you become the source it trusts.
To help retailers get ahead of this shift, Shopify has published a free, practical resource: the AI Discoverability Checklist. It is a step-by-step guide to turning your product data into a trusted source of truth, so that AI agents have accurate, up-to-date information about what you sell and who you are.
The checklist is deliberately hands-on. It walks through five areas that determine whether your products show up in AI chats:
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Product data. How to make your catalogue clean, complete, and machine-readable, so an agent can parse every attribute without guessing.
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Product detail pages. How to structure the page itself so both shoppers and agents find the answers they need in seconds.
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Search engine optimisation. How the foundations you already have feed into AI discovery rather than working against it.
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Brand authority. How to build the signals of trust that make an AI confident enough to recommend you by name.
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Selling in AI chats. How to make your products not just discoverable but buyable in the moment of recommendation.
It is the kind of resource a team can pick up and act on the same week, whether you run the ecommerce function at a fast-growing brand or lead digital at an established retailer.
Why this matters now
Timing is everything. We are heading into the busiest trading period of the year, and shopper habits formed during peak season tend to stick. The retailers who make themselves discoverable to AI before the rush will compound that advantage well into next year. Those who wait risk becoming invisible in exactly the channel that is growing fastest.
There is also a structural reason to move now. Shopify's Catalog, the agent-ready discovery engine behind the platform, already holds over one billion products structured for AI agents, and products surfaced through it convert at twice the rate of general AI search that scrapes the open web. On Shopify, merchants are agent-ready from day one, and can sell across every major AI channel, with OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all now working with Shopify to open more commerce front doors. The infrastructure is ready. The question is whether your product data is.
Come and pressure-test your strategy in person
If you would like to go deeper, come and find the Shopify team at Ecommerce Expo, London, on the 23rd and 24th of September.
The era of agentic commerce is here. The brands that treat their product data as a strategic asset, rather than an afterthought, will be the ones AI recommends. The checklist is the fastest way to start.
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