Agentic commerce, explained

Assistants

• How to appear in Google AI Mode shopping results

  Appearing in an AI channel where the purchase completes in-channel is decided by your product record rather than your product page, which means feed completeness, freshness and identifier coverage matter more than the page level work most stores invest in. Search ranking does not transfer, because ranking rewards a page satisfying a query and this rewards a record answering a constraint.

• How to appear in ChatGPT shopping results

  There is no form to submit and no ranking to buy. Appearing in an assistant’s shopping results is the outcome of three conditions: your pages can be fetched, your catalogue can be enumerated cheaply, and your published data answers the constraints a shopper stated. Each one is checkable today, and failing an earlier one makes the later ones irrelevant.

• Which assistants send shoppers to your own checkout

  Shopify documents ChatGPT shoppers completing on the merchant’s own checkout in an in-app browser, and Google AI Mode, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot completing in the AI channel’s Shopify-powered direct checkout. The split determines where your risk sits, and it has moved once already, so it is worth rechecking rather than memorising.

• What changed when Instant Checkout was retired

  Retail Dive reported on 25 March 2026 that OpenAI had announced the previous day it was retiring the first version of Instant Checkout, with checkout moving back to merchant sites. For merchants that is favourable, because the thing being tested is now their own checkout and they keep the customer and the order data, and it is a larger obligation, because a checkout failure now costs the order outright.

• How Perplexity shopping works for merchants

  An assistant built around answering with sources rewards merchants whose facts are stated plainly and can be attributed to a page. For a store that means the specifics a buyer needs should exist as clear statements rather than being implied by imagery or buried in marketing register, because a claim that cannot be quoted is a claim that cannot be used.

• How Google AI Mode chooses products

  When a purchase completes inside the channel, the product record rather than the product page is what competes, so feed completeness, freshness and identifier coverage do more work than anything on your storefront. That inverts the usual priority order, where a store invests in pages first and treats the feed as an export.

• How ChatGPT shopping chooses products

  An assistant choosing a product works through the constraints a shopper stated, filters candidates that fail them, and chooses among the survivors. Most of what decides the outcome is therefore arithmetic on published facts rather than judgement about quality, which is why a store with a genuinely better offer can lose to one that simply published its shipping cost.

• Can Claude buy from your store?

  What any assistant needs from your store is the same: permission to fetch, a catalogue it can enumerate, and product data that answers a shopper’s constraints. Where a purchase completes varies by assistant and changes, so that part belongs in vendor documentation rather than in an article, while the readiness work is identical and can be verified today.

• Can Microsoft Copilot buy from your store?

  Shopify’s help centre groups Microsoft Copilot with Google AI Mode and Gemini as assistants whose shoppers complete their purchase in the AI channel’s Shopify-powered direct checkout. As with those, your product data carries the sale rather than your storefront, and the work that makes you competitive is the same work that serves every other assistant.

• Can Google AI Mode buy from your store?

  Shopify’s help centre says shoppers using Google AI Mode complete their purchase in the AI channel’s Shopify-powered direct checkout without leaving the conversation. Since your storefront is not in the path, your feed and your published product data decide everything, and the ordinary levers of merchandising, design and on-site persuasion do not apply.

• Can Gemini buy from your store?

  Shopify’s help centre says shoppers using Google AI Mode, Gemini or Microsoft Copilot complete their purchase in the AI channel’s Shopify-powered direct checkout without leaving the conversation. For a Shopify merchant that means your checkout is not in the path at all and your published product data carries the entire sale, which changes what is worth fixing first.

• Can Perplexity buy from your store?

  Whether any assistant can buy from your store is decided by three things that do not vary between them: whether you permit the fetch, whether your catalogue can be enumerated, and whether your published data answers the constraints a shopper stated. What does vary is where the purchase completes, and that changes often enough that the reliable answer comes from each vendor’s current documentation rather than from an article.