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How granular should store categories be for agents?

Granular enough that a shopper request maps onto one. If a customer would say it out loud, walking boots, waterproof jackets, cafetieres, it should probably be a category. The failure is not usually too many categories, it is one enormous one: a shop with four hundred products under Products has given an agent nothing to narrow with, so it either opens everything or gives up and asks somewhere else.

Why it happens

Agents work under a fetch budget, so narrowing is how they get to the relevant part of a catalogue at all. A category is a cheap filter: one URL that returns the candidates. Without one, the only available filter is reading everything, and reading everything is exactly what the budget prevents.

The result is a quiet mismatch. Your store may stock the best answer to the shopper request and be represented in the comparison by an unrelated product, because that was the product in reach.

Run a free scan and find out which of these your store actually hits.