What is agentic commerce? Definition and how it works

Agentic commerce is shopping where an AI agent researches, compares and, with your approval, buys for you. How it works and how brands make the shortlist.

  • Alvaro Peña de Luna Alvaro Peña de Luna
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    Wednesday, Sep 30, 2026

Agentic commerce is shopping in which an AI agent acts on the buyer's behalf: it researches products, compares options and, with the buyer's permission, completes steps such as adding to cart or paying.

In classic ecommerce, a person visits stores and decides. In agentic commerce, a person states a need ("running shoes for flat feet under 120 euros") and the agent does the legwork.

How agentic commerce works

A typical purchase through an agent goes through four stages:

  1. Intent. The buyer describes what they want, with constraints such as budget, size, delivery date or brand preferences.
  2. Research. The agent searches the web, product listings and reviews, much like an AI search engine answering a question.
  3. Shortlist and comparison. It narrows the options to a few products and explains why each fits.
  4. Checkout. With the buyer's approval, it places the order through the merchant or the platform it runs on.

The last step needs shared rules for identity and payment. In 2025, OpenAI and Stripe published the Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google published the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), both meant to let agents buy from merchants with the buyer's explicit permission.

Why agentic commerce matters for brands

When an agent shops, the shortlist replaces the results page. The buyer may never see the products the agent discarded, never visit your category page and never meet your ads. Two things decide whether you make the cut:

  • Whether AI engines already name you. The research step works like any AI answer: brands mentioned in reviews, comparisons and trusted sources are the ones the agent finds.
  • Whether your product data is usable. An agent cannot recommend a product whose price, stock or delivery time it cannot read.

How to prepare for agentic commerce

  • Complete, consistent product data. Names, variants, prices, availability, shipping and returns should match across your site, your product feeds and marketplaces.
  • Structured data on product pages. Product, Offer and review markup make your pages easier to read by machines. See structured data for AI and test your markup with the schema validator.
  • Crawlable pages. If your robots.txt blocks AI crawlers, agents that read pages through those crawlers may not see your catalog. The AI crawler checker shows which ones you allow.
  • Clear fit statements. Say who each product is for and what problem it solves, in words a buyer would use in a request.

How to measure your place in the shortlist

You cannot see inside a buyer's agent, but you can check the research step it depends on: how AI engines answer shopping questions in your category.

Shortlist rate = shopping prompts where your product is named / shopping prompts checked × 100

Worked example: you track 30 buying questions ("best waterproof hiking boots for wide feet") and check each on three engines, 90 answers in total. Your brand is named in 18, a shortlist rate of 20%. Look at the answers where you are missing: the brands named instead, and the sources cited, show you which reviews and comparisons you need to appear in.

Common mistakes

  • Treating agentic commerce as a checkout problem only, when most purchases are decided at research.
  • Leaving prices and stock out of the page text or markup, so machines cannot read them.
  • Blocking every AI crawler by default without deciding which ones you want.

How Mencoro relates to agentic commerce

Mencoro does not see what an agent buys, but it measures the two public signals agents draw on. First, the AI answers to the product questions you choose, on the AI engines it checks: whether your brand is named, whether it is recommended, compared or just listed, its tone, and which sources are cited. Second, Google Shopping: the organic product listings for your keywords, where a listing counts as yours when you are the seller, with your best position and your Shopping coverage (the share of checks with one of your listings). Sponsored listings do not count. The methodology page explains both, and the competitor analysis feature shows how your brand compares with the others named in the same answers. For how AI answers are shaped, see our guide to AI search optimization.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Not quite. Conversational commerce is buying through a chat, often with a brand's own bot or a human agent. Agentic commerce goes further: an AI agent works across many stores for the buyer, compares options and can complete steps such as checkout with the buyer's permission.
In the systems launched so far, yes. The agent researches and prepares the purchase, and the buyer confirms before any payment. The payment protocols published for agents are designed around that explicit permission.
Make your product information complete and machine-readable: accurate names, prices, availability, shipping and returns, in both your product feeds and your pages' structured data. Then make sure AI crawlers can reach those pages, and check whether AI engines already name your products for the questions buyers ask.

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