Your online store may already be visible to AI shopping assistants

If you sell online, your products may already be showing up when shoppers ask ChatGPT or Gemini for gift ideas, and you may not know it. Platforms switched on much of the behind-the-scenes setup this year. With the holidays close, a few minutes of checking can show whether AI tools find your store and describe it correctly.

What changed

Google built a standard called the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP. It gives AI assistants a common way to read a store's catalog, prices and stock. Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart helped develop it. Shopify turned it on by default for eligible merchants, with no setup. Stripe offers a similar path for stores on WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace and Etsy, though some may need an opt-in step, such as installing an extension.

Why it matters

Adobe reports that AI-referred visits to U.S. retail sites converted 60% higher than other traffic in July, and brought in 53% more revenue per visit. It was the 11th straight month AI traffic did better on conversion, meaning more visitors bought. Shopify says 75% of AI-attributed orders in the second quarter came from outside its top 100 product categories, a good sign for specialty shops.

Staying out is not really an option. Abhay Singhal of Glance says waiting means AI agents describe your store from whatever they could scrape, instead of from your own data.

What to do

No developer is needed for a first look. These checks are a good start:

• Note which platform your store runs on, since that shapes how far along you are.
• On Shopify, open Sales channels, then Agentic, to see if your catalog is live.
• Ask an AI assistant about one product's size, today's price and delivery time. Compare it with your site.
• Look for a "block AI bots" setting. Singhal warns it can stop the agents that send customers.
• Try Glance's free Ready, Set, Agent scanner, which runs 80 checks in under a minute.

Even the best store in Glance's scans, aaltousa.com, scored only 61 as of mid-September, out of more than 8,000 sites. It failed three of four bot-access checks.

What is still missing

Buying inside an AI chat is still taking shape. Google's UCP checkout is limited to eligible U.S. retailers, and features like multi-item carts are still planned. OpenAI scaled back its Instant Checkout feature in March to focus on product discovery. Forrester analyst Sucharita Kodali says very little in commerce is truly agentic yet. Most of what exists is AI showing up in search and discovery.

Her advice is to start with what you already have. As she puts it, if readiness turns into a major IT project, something is off. Singhal adds a simple rule of thumb: if you do not show up, it is an access problem. If you show up wrong, it is a data problem.