Glossary

Agentic commerce glossary

Agentic commerce has acquired a vocabulary faster than it has acquired agreement, and several of the words in it mean different things to a merchant and to an engineer. These are the terms that come up when a store is being measured on whether an AI agent can buy from it. Each entry is written to answer on its own, without needing the one before it.

• Agent payments protocol

  Also called AP2.

  An agent payments protocol is a standard for the payment half of an agent purchase: how an agent proves it is authorised to spend a particular person’s money, on a particular purchase, inside limits that person set in advance.

• Agent readiness score

  An agent readiness score is a rating of how well a storefront exposes itself to AI agents, calculated from signals that can be read without buying anything: robots rules, structured data, feeds, published policies and whether bot protection lets an agent through.

• Agentic checkout

  An agentic checkout is a checkout an AI agent can finish without a human hand on the mouse: every required choice can be made from readable data, and every required control can be operated without hovering, dragging or waiting for an animation to settle.

• Agentic commerce

  Agentic commerce is shopping carried out by an AI agent acting on a person’s behalf. The shopper states an intent, software finds candidate products, compares them and completes the purchase, and the shopper may never load the storefront at all.

• Agentic Commerce Protocol

  Also called ACP.

  The Agentic Commerce Protocol, usually shortened to ACP, is one of the named efforts to standardise agent initiated purchases, so that an agent can present an order to a merchant through an agreed interface rather than by filling in a checkout form built for a person.

• Agentic storefront

  An agentic storefront is the surface a commerce platform exposes so AI channels can read a store’s catalogue and transact against it, without a shopper loading the storefront a person would see.

• AI shopping agent

  Also called shopping agent, buying agent.

  An AI shopping agent is a program that carries out a purchase task for a person: it reads storefronts, picks a product against the constraints the shopper gave it, and then drives the checkout far enough for the purchase to happen.

• Answer engine

  An answer engine is a system that responds to a question with a composed answer and its sources, rather than with a list of links for the person to work through.

• Bot wall

  A bot wall is any protection layer that stops an automated client before the storefront renders: an interactive challenge, an interstitial page, an outright block, or a rate limit that returns nothing useful.

• Canonical URL

  A canonical URL is the address a site declares to be the authoritative one for a piece of content, where the same thing is reachable at several addresses.

• Cart mandate

  A cart mandate is the record of what a shopper authorised an agent to buy: the specific items, the total, and the conditions attached, captured in a form the merchant and the payment provider can check without taking the agent’s word for it.

• Consent wall

  A consent wall is a banner or overlay that blocks interaction with a page until the visitor accepts or rejects something, most often cookies, and which therefore sits in front of everything else the page contains.

• Conversational commerce

  Conversational commerce is selling through a chat interface, where a person describes what they want in their own words and is answered in conversation, rather than browsing a catalogue and navigating a storefront themselves.

• Crawl budget

  Crawl budget is the limited number of requests an automated client will spend on a site before moving on, whether that limit comes from politeness, cost or time.

• Delegated purchase

  A delegated purchase is one a person authorises an agent to make on their behalf, so the decision to buy and the act of buying are separated in time and performed by different parties.

• Feed freshness

  Feed freshness is how recently a product feed’s contents were rebuilt, and therefore how likely its prices and availability are to be right at the moment something reads them.

• GTIN

  Also called Global Trade Item Number, UPC, EAN.

  A GTIN, or Global Trade Item Number, is the standard identifier behind a product’s barcode. It names the item itself rather than your listing of it, which is what lets two different stores be recognised as selling the same thing.

• Guest checkout

  Guest checkout is a checkout that completes with a delivery address and an email address, without the shopper creating an account, choosing a password or confirming anything from an inbox first.

• Headless commerce

  Also called decoupled storefront.

  Headless commerce separates the storefront a shopper sees from the commerce platform that holds the catalogue and processes orders, with the two communicating over an API.

• In-app browser

  Also called embedded browser, webview.

  An in-app browser is the stripped down browser embedded inside another application, which is where a purchase referred by an assistant frequently completes rather than in the shopper’s usual browser.

• Interstitial

  An interstitial is a page or overlay served in place of the content that was requested, which the visitor has to get past before continuing, and which an automated client generally cannot.

• JSON-LD

  JSON-LD is a way of embedding structured data in a page as a single block of JSON, rather than as attributes scattered through the markup, and it is the usual format for publishing product facts an agent can read.

• llms.txt

  An llms.txt file is a plain text index published at the root of a site that tells an AI client what the site is and which pages carry the answers, in the way robots.txt tells a crawler where it may go.

• Merchant of record

  Also called MoR.

  The merchant of record is the party legally selling to the shopper: the name on the receipt, the entity that owes the sales tax, takes the chargeback and carries the refund obligation.

• Model Context Protocol

  Also called MCP.

  The Model Context Protocol, usually shortened to MCP, is an open standard for connecting an AI model to external tools and data through one defined interface, so a capability can be published once and used by any client that speaks the protocol.

• MPN

  Also called manufacturer part number.

  An MPN is the part number a manufacturer assigns to a product. It identifies the item within that manufacturer’s range, and unlike a GTIN it is only unique when paired with the brand.

• Product feed

  A product feed is a machine-readable file listing a catalogue: one entry per sellable item, carrying an identifier, a title, a price, an availability state and a link back to the product page, in a format built for a program rather than a reader.

• Product structured data

  Also called schema.org Product, product markup.

  Product structured data is machine-readable markup embedded in a product page, usually a schema.org Product object in a JSON-LD block, stating the name, price, availability, identifiers and variants as data rather than as layout.

• Product variant

  A product variant is one specific sellable configuration of a product, such as a size, a colour, a capacity or a combination of them, each with its own price, its own availability and its own identifier.

• Progressive enhancement

  Progressive enhancement is building a page so that its core function works without JavaScript, and then improving the experience for clients able to run it, rather than depending on scripts for the page to work at all.

• Purchase attempt

  A purchase attempt is a check in which an agent actually drives the store rather than reading it: it opens a product, chooses an option, adds it to the cart, opens the cart, starts checkout and goes as far as the payment step.

• robots.txt

  A robots.txt is a file at the root of a site stating which automated clients may request which paths. It is a convention that well behaved operators follow, not an enforcement mechanism.

• Server rendering

  Also called SSR.

  Server rendering is producing a page’s HTML on the server so that the response already contains the content, rather than sending a shell for the browser to fill in.

• Sitemap

  A sitemap is a machine readable list of the URLs on a site, published so that a crawler or an agent can enumerate what exists rather than discovering it by following links.

• SKU

  Also called stock keeping unit.

  A SKU is the identifier a retailer assigns to a sellable item for its own stock control. It is unique within that business and meaningless outside it.

• Stall

  A stall is the point at which an AI agent stops making progress towards a purchase on a store. Ottom gives each one a stable code, records the journey stage it happened in, and reports it as a single thing to fix rather than as a score going down.

• Universal Commerce Protocol

  Also called UCP.

  The Universal Commerce Protocol, usually shortened to UCP, is one of the named efforts to standardise how an AI agent reads a merchant’s catalogue and places an order through a defined interface, instead of inferring both from a storefront built for a human.

• User agent

  A user agent is the string a client sends to identify itself when requesting a page, and it is how a store distinguishes a browser from a search crawler from a shopping agent.

• Variant matrix

  A variant matrix is the full set of sellable combinations of a product’s options, each of which is a distinct purchasable item carrying its own price, availability and identifier rather than inheriting the parent product’s.

• Web bot auth

  Web bot auth is the approach of having an automated client prove its identity cryptographically when it makes a request, so a site can tell a named, accountable agent apart from anonymous traffic sending the same user agent string.

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