Insights on AI commerce

How AI shopping agents discover, evaluate, and recommend products — and what you can do about it.

Meta Pixel now auto-enriches events with product details — what it does, and what Shopify merchants need to check

Meta turned on AI-driven page and product enrichment for eligible Meta Pixels by default. Here's what's flowing back to Meta, why it helps ad performance and dynamic product ads, what it doesn't replace in your Pixel and CAPI work, and the Shopify Web Pixels API wrinkle that may stop it from firing for you.

AEO vs SEO: what changed, what's new, and what carries over

AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is the term the SEO industry settled on for optimizing for AI agents. Here's what's actually different from traditional SEO, and what the new vocabulary obscures.

Do AI agents read your JSON-LD? The honest picture in 2026

Recent testing shows ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity ignore JSON-LD when they fetch a page directly. That finding is real — and it's not the whole story. Here's how AI agents actually meet your products, and where structured data still does the work.

Anthropic's Project Deal: when both sides of a sale are AI, your data does the negotiating

Anthropic ran a marketplace where Claude agents bought and sold real goods on behalf of employees. The headline isn't that it worked — it's that buyers using weaker models lost money and didn't notice. Here's what merchants should take from it.

TikTok Shop and AI-driven discovery

TikTok Shop's product surfacing has a creator-driven layer and an algorithmic layer. The algorithmic layer reads catalog signals the same way other commerce platforms do. What's documented, what's plausible inference, and what's still opaque.

Building the business case for AI commerce optimization

Three framings that work for an executive who has to defend the budget — and the two that consistently land flat. The argument shapes are durable; the supporting numbers have to come from the catalog's own data.

Review and AggregateRating schema after Google's 2024 changes

Google narrowed which review markup earns organic-search rich results. The schema itself is unchanged — still valid Schema.org, still parsed by Google Merchant Center and Bing. What's documented, what's plausible, and what to keep vs. drop.

ChatGPT product discovery: how OpenAI killed Instant Checkout (and what replaced it)

OpenAI replaced Instant Checkout with discovery-first commerce in ChatGPT, built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Lumio breaks down what changed, why retailers backed off, and how brands should respond.

The economics of AI commerce: what's measurable, what isn't, and what that means for budget

AI-referred traffic is small relative to organic and paid, structurally undercounted in standard analytics, and shaped by selection effects that change its per-customer value. The economic shape of the channel — what's verifiable, what's hypothesis, and what an operator can actually act on in 2026.

This week in AI commerce: Visa builds the on-ramp, Shopify hands over the keys

Visa launched a unified agentic payments platform, Shopify gave AI agents live store access, Juniper sized the market at $1.5T, and Meta shipped its first commerce model. Here's what happened April 7–11.

Analytics for AI agents: measuring a web where bots outnumber humans

Traditional analytics were built for browsers, not autonomous agents. Here's what to measure when AI agents are doing the shopping — and why your GA4 dashboard is already lying to you.

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): when the AI surface becomes the checkout

Google's UCP lets shoppers buy directly inside AI Mode and Gemini — no redirect, no website. Here's how it works and why your product feed just became your storefront.

Pet products: an emerging category with unsettled data standards

Pet retail has no equivalent of GS1's apparel taxonomy or the FDA-mandated nutrition panel for human food. The Schema.org modeling questions that follow from that gap, and the category-specific attributes that don't fit a default Product schema.

Bing's quiet role in AI search

Bing's organic search share is small. Bing's footprint across the AI surfaces shoppers actually use is larger because the same index sits behind several of them. What that means for ecommerce optimization in 2026.

Why llms.txt doesn't fix your product data (but you should still have one)

The llms.txt standard is gaining traction in ecommerce. But creating the file without fixing the content it points to is putting a signpost in front of an empty store. Here's what the file actually does, what it doesn't, and the correct order of operations.

AI readiness by category: how apparel, electronics, and beauty stack up

AI readiness gaps aren't the same across every product category. Here's what apparel, electronics, and beauty brands each get wrong — and what good looks like.

What is ChatGPT Shopping — and how does it choose products?

ChatGPT now recommends specific products with prices, images, and buy links. Here's how it discovers products and what brands can do about it.

Generative engine optimization: the new SEO for AI-powered commerce

SEO got your products into Google's index. GEO gets them into AI answers. Here's what brands need to know about optimizing for generative engines.

The GEO reading list: essential resources for AI commerce optimization

A curated collection of guides, documentation, and analysis for brands preparing their product data for AI-powered discovery.

The 6 JSON-LD fields most brands miss

Your product pages have JSON-LD markup. But are you using the fields that AI shopping agents actually need? These six are missing from most catalogs.

JSON-LD for AI shoppers: the structured data that makes or breaks your visibility

AI shopping agents don't read your marketing copy. They read your JSON-LD. Here's what they look for, what most brands get wrong, and how to fix it.

People-first content still wins — even when the 'people' are AI agents

Google's helpful content guidance and AI commerce optimization aren't at odds. They're saying the same thing: be specific, be honest, be useful.

Your product feed is your AI storefront

AI shopping agents read your product feed before they ever visit your website. If your feed is thin, stale, or sloppy, you're invisible — no matter how good your site looks.

Product schema markup in 15 minutes: a quickstart for brands

A step-by-step guide to adding JSON-LD Product markup to your product pages — from minimum viable schema to a complete implementation with reviews, ratings, and offers.

The AI Readiness Score: what it measures and why it matters

A deep dive into the six dimensions that determine whether AI shopping agents recommend your products.

Why AI shopping agents can't find your products

91% of online brands are invisible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. Here's why — and what to do about it.