Agentic commerce is AI finding, comparing and buying products for a person. The finding and comparing already happen in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and Amazon's Alexa for Shopping. The buying happens in more places than most people think. Google, Perplexity and, in beta, Copilot take the payment inside the AI. And seven products can buy for a person, either after the person approves or at a price the person set. What no company tells us is how many shoppers actually buy this way.
Look closely and some of it is great on paper, but either not working as intended or not used in real life. OpenAI dropped Instant Checkout in March 2026, and its announcement never used the word. Shopify stores carry a file for AI agents that, as far as anyone has confirmed, only Google reads. And the box where an agent passes on what the shopper says about themselves made no measurable difference in my tests.
For a store, that adds up to a whole new surface it exposes, and it probably does not know what it says.
This page covers how AI finds, chooses and buys from a store, what is real and what is only announced, and what to check.
Last checked: 18 October 2026. Every row in the tables comes from each company's documentation, checked on that date, and the page is updated monthly. It covers AI products built for Western markets. Most of them are live in the US first, with Canada, Australia and India where a company says so. I'm researching where agentic commerce stands in China for a separate article.
HOW AI IS CHANGING THE INTERNET: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE POINTLESS
Nobody asked us if we wanted the internet changed. So every week I send one email about one thing AI did to it, with the receipts, and what to do about it. Sometimes the honest answer is "not yet."
From someone who pays attention to this for a living.
Contents
- Ten AI Products Now Find, Compare Or Buy Products For Shoppers
- Shopify, Other Platforms And Custom-Built Stores Each Start From A Different Place
- AI Agents Find A Store's Products Through Catalogs, Feeds And Product Pages
- The Product An AI Agent Picks Depends On Descriptions, Reviews And Filters
- Google, Copilot And Perplexity Take Payment Inside The AI, While ChatGPT Sends Shoppers To The Store
- Personal Agents Like Dots, Muse And Grok Bot Buy On The Store's Website
- A Free Check Shows Whether An AI Agent Can Buy A Shopify Product
- ACP, UCP And AP2 Are The Protocols Behind Agentic Commerce
- Every Row On This Page Comes From Each Company's Documentation, Rechecked Monthly
Ten AI Products Now Find, Compare Or Buy Products For Shoppers
Ten AI products shop for people today. Five are shopping features inside AI assistants. The other five are personal agents: AI that goes out on the web and does things for one person. I checked every row against each company's pages on 18 October 2026.
Shopping inside AI assistants
| Product | What it does for a shopper | Where it is live | Where you pay | Built on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | Finds and compares products in a chat, then sends you to the store | US | On the store's website or app | ACP product feeds, Shopify Catalog |
| Google AI Mode and Gemini | Finds products, lets you pay with Google Pay on eligible listings, or buys on the store's website when the price drops to what you set | US | Inside Google, or on the store's website | UCP, Google Pay, Merchant Center |
| Microsoft Copilot | Compares products, and lets you pay in the chat with participating merchants (checkout in beta) | US | Inside Copilot, or on the store's website | ACP, UCP-ready feeds, Shopify Catalog |
| Perplexity | Shows product cards, and lets you pay in Perplexity with Instant Buy | US, free for all users since November 2025 | Inside Perplexity | PayPal |
| Alexa for Shopping (Amazon) | Compares, tracks prices and buys automatically at a price you set. Its Buy for Me feature buys on other brands' websites | US | On Amazon, or on the brand's website | Not stated by Amazon |
Personal agents that act for a person
| Agent | What it does for a person | Where it is live | Where it buys | Built on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muse (Meta) | An agent that runs all the time, uses a browser to work on tasks, and asks before it buys | US and Canada, 18+ | On the store's website, with a single-use card | Link by Stripe, Shopify Catalog |
| Dots (OpenAI) | Agents with a cloud computer and browser that sign in to websites and do the work | ChatGPT Pro outside the EEA, UK and Switzerland. Business Premium and Enterprise rolling out | On the store's website, with a card already saved there | None named by OpenAI |
| Grok Bot (xAI) | AI "teammates" that share a cloud computer and work across apps and websites | Beta, paid plans only | On the store's website | Link by Stripe |
| Gemini in Chrome (Google) | Does multi-step tasks in Chrome, like adding to cart and filling in forms | Preview for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers: US desktop and Android, India | On the store's website | UCP support announced, not confirmed live |
| Comet (Perplexity) | A browser with an assistant that compares and buys on websites where you are signed in | Free, desktop and mobile | On the store's website | None stated by Perplexity |
Two OpenAI products have already gone. ChatGPT's agent mode "is no longer available", and "Atlas has since been deprecated", both in OpenAI's words.
None of these companies says how many shoppers buy through them. The only usage numbers are Amazon's, that Rufus "helped over 300 million customers in 2025", and Perplexity's, that "millions of people use Comet every day". The first counts people using a shopping assistant, not an agent buying for them. The second counts people browsing, not shopping.
Shopify, Other Platforms And Custom-Built Stores Each Start From A Different Place
Whatever a store runs on, three things come first: fix the basics, check what is on by default, and test it yourself. To test it, ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Copilot and Perplexity for your products and read what comes back.
Shopify. Your store is most likely in Shopify Catalog already, and in every AI channel Shopify feeds from it, because Shopify signs up eligible stores by default. Open Sales channels, then Agentic, in the admin to see what is switched on. Then move the facts shoppers ask about (ingredients, materials, sizes, what it works with) out of tabs and into the product description, and look at your reviews. Most Shopify owners have not looked at this new surface yet.
BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace and WooCommerce. Your products reach Google through Merchant Center, Microsoft through Microsoft Merchant Center, and ChatGPT through OpenAI's merchant application. Agentic Commerce For Small Merchants goes through which route fits which platform.
A custom-built store. Make sure the product, price and stock are in the page before any scripts run, add Product and Offer markup (hidden labels that tell machines the name, price and stock) that matches the page, send product feeds to Google and Microsoft Merchant Center, and decide on purpose which AI agents your robots.txt file lets in.
AI Agents Find A Store's Products Through Catalogs, Feeds And Product Pages
AI shopping agents find a store's products in three places: platform catalogs, product feeds and the product pages themselves.
Platform catalogs. Shopify puts eligible stores in Shopify Catalog by default. Its help pages say that is how products reach ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Meta, while Google AI Mode and Gemini get them from Google Merchant Center. Shopify Now Enrols Your Store In Every New AI Shopping Channel explains what that switch does and how to turn it off. If you build on Shopify's catalog, note that its Global Catalog REST API stops working on 2 November 2026 and is replaced by its MCP version.
Product feeds. A feed is a file a store sends with all its products, prices and stock. OpenAI takes feeds through a merchant application, and Shopify and Etsy catalogs are already included. Google uses Merchant Center feeds, and Microsoft takes UCP-ready feeds in Microsoft Merchant Center in the US. None of the three lets anyone check from outside whether a store's feed is live.
Product pages. An agent that visits the website reads the product page itself, and two things decide what it gets.
The first is robots.txt, the file that tells bots what they may visit. The AI companies split on it. OpenAI says website owners control its search crawler and GPTBot through robots.txt, and Anthropic and Google say their crawlers follow it. But the fetchers a person sends say they may not. OpenAI says of ChatGPT-User that "robots.txt rules may not apply", and Google says its user-triggered fetchers "generally ignore robots.txt rules".
The second is JavaScript. If the product details only appear after scripts run, some agents may not see them. Google is the only company that says how it handles this, and for Shopping it recommends "putting Product structured data in the initial HTML for best results". How AI Agents See Your Website goes into this in depth.
So a store controls three things here: whether it is in the catalog, whether its feeds are complete and up to date, and whether its product pages can be read before any scripts run.
The Product An AI Agent Picks Depends On Descriptions, Reviews And Filters
What an AI shopping agent can see shapes which product it picks. Three things showed up in my tests of Shopify Catalog in October 2026.
Facts in the description got through. Facts in a tab mostly did not. I took 50 moisturisers from one search. On the stores' pages, 36 showed a full ingredient list. In the catalog's text, 5 did. Most stores keep the list in a tab, and the catalog only carries the description.
Reviews push products up. Across 1,305 searches of Shopify Catalog, products with more reviews came back higher in 78 of 91 searches that returned 50 products.
Filters change the results. The intent box does not. Shopify's documented example search is "trail running shoes", with the intent "Customer runs marathons and needs road shoes". Sent as words alone, it returned the same ten products in the same order with the intent and without it. A price limit or a gender filter changed most of the list. The raw results are published.
So for a store: put the facts shoppers ask about in the product description, look after your reviews, and fill in the details filters use, like price, size and colour. The stores that do this are the ones an agent can read and pick, and all of it is in the store's hands.
Google, Copilot And Perplexity Take Payment Inside The AI, While ChatGPT Sends Shoppers To The Store
Checkout happens in one of two places: inside the AI product, or on the store's website.
ChatGPT sends shoppers to the store. OpenAI's merchant page says: "We're moving away from a standalone Instant Checkout experience in ChatGPT and prioritizing better shopping discovery and merchant-owned checkout experiences." OpenAI dropped Instant Checkout in March 2026. Its announcement never used the word. It said the first version "did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide", so stores could run checkout on their websites while OpenAI focused on helping people find products. About 30 Shopify merchants were on Instant Checkout as of February 2026, by Forrester's count reported by CNBC. OpenAI's developer documentation still invites applications.
Google, Microsoft and Perplexity take the payment inside the AI.
- Google has a checkout through UCP in AI Mode and Gemini, where the store stays the seller. It also has agentic checkout, which buys on the store's website at a price the shopper set, and a Universal Cart that began rolling out in the US on 15 October 2026. Google says UCP "already enables direct checkout for hundreds of thousands of brands and retailers".
- Microsoft announced Copilot Checkout on 8 January 2026. It is in beta for participating merchants, open to English-language merchants selling to US buyers, with PayPal, Shopify and Stripe handling payment.
- Perplexity's Instant Buy has been free for all US users since 25 November 2025, and sends "your order and payment" to the store.
On Shopify, checkout inside the AI is on by default. Shopify's help pages say Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Meta use a "Shopify-powered direct checkout" for buyers in the US (on Meta, also Canada and Mexico). Google's is still rolling out. ChatGPT uses the store's checkout.
Most of the payment technology underneath is still in preview or pilot. Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens, which let an agent pay without seeing the card, are in public preview. Visa says its Intelligent Commerce has "live transactions taking place today" in the US, while its Intelligent Commerce Connect is "currently in pilot". Mastercard said in September 2025 that Citi and US Bank cardholders could use Agent Pay.
The courts have given a first answer. On 4 August 2026 the Ninth Circuit cancelled the court order Amazon had won against Perplexity's Comet. The court held that it is the user who "accesses" Amazon's computers, with the help of the agent. What Amazon v. Perplexity means for agent visitors explains how narrow that ruling is.
Personal Agents Like Dots, Muse And Grok Bot Buy On The Store's Website
A personal agent does not need a platform's catalog or checkout. It can go to the store's website and buy there, the same way the person would.
All five personal agents can buy today. OpenAI says Dots "can make purchases using cards you've already saved on a merchant's website", with the person's approval. xAI says Grok Bot "can complete purchases on your behalf" once the person connects Link by Stripe. Meta's Muse buys through its browser with a single-use card. Perplexity's Comet "finds and purchases the item for you". And Google says Gemini in Chrome is "designed to pause and explicitly ask for your confirmation" before it buys.
Stores have a door for agents too. By default, Shopify puts a file at /.well-known/ucp on the stores it hosts. It tells agents what the store can do (search, cart, checkout) and where to connect. When I checked 2,207 Shopify stores from its catalog on 17 October 2026, 2,177 had the file. Shopify's default robots.txt now points agents to the store's /api/ucp/mcp address, and in August Shopify switched on WebMCP for every Liquid storefront. The only reader of the file anyone has confirmed is Google, which reads it when a merchant enters it in Merchant Center.
Here, the website is the shop. The product page, the cart and the checkout have to work for a visitor that is software, sent by a person. And since the fetchers a person sends say they may not follow robots.txt, blocking them there is not a reliable way to keep them out.
Whose side the agent is on matters for which store it picks. An agent that shops for you has to work for you, not for the company that built it.
A Free Check Shows Whether An AI Agent Can Buy A Shopify Product
The free agentic commerce check takes one product page from a Shopify store and follows the route an AI shopping agent takes to a sale. For every step it says what it found and who is confirmed to read that signal today. There is no score.
- Find: the robots.txt rules for every named AI agent, and whether the product is in Shopify's catalog.
- Understand: the page before any script runs, its product markup and identifiers, and whether the price agrees everywhere.
- Buy: agent checkout through UCP, and the return and shipping terms an agent can state.
The check only reads what is public, and it never adds anything to a cart. It leaves out llms.txt and /.well-known/api-catalog, because no AI shopping agent is confirmed to read them. It also leaves out product feeds and CDN bot rules, because nobody can see those from outside a store's accounts.
ACP, UCP And AP2 Are The Protocols Behind Agentic Commerce
Underneath all of this sit three open protocols, the shared rules that let agents, stores and payment companies work together, plus two programmes from the card networks. For each one: who is behind it, which version is current, and what is actually in use.
ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
- Who: OpenAI, Stripe and Meta. Meta was added to the maintainers file on 24 April 2026. The repository calls it beta.
- Current version: 2026-04-17.
- In use: product feeds and discovery in ChatGPT. OpenAI names Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe's, Best Buy, The Home Depot and Wayfair as "integrated into ACP for discovery".
- Written but not used by default: checkout inside ChatGPT.
UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)
- Who: Google and Shopify, together with Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Stripe and Salesforce joined its tech council in April 2026.
- Current version: v2026-08-25.
- In use: checkout and carts in Google AI Mode and Gemini in the US, UCP-ready feeds in Microsoft Merchant Center, and the file on Shopify stores.
- Announced only: Canada, Australia and the UK, and support in Chrome.
- More: What Google's UCP Tells Us About Agent-Ready Websites.
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
- Who: Google created it in September 2025 with more than 60 organisations, and handed it to the FIDO Alliance on 28 April 2026.
- Current version: v0.2.0.
- In use: none confirmed. Google said in May 2026 it would bring AP2 to its products "in the coming months, starting with Gemini Spark".
Visa and Mastercard
- Visa runs Intelligent Commerce, which has live transactions in the US, a Trusted Agent Protocol published as sample code, and Intelligent Commerce Connect, which is in pilot.
- Mastercard runs Agent Pay. Citi and US Bank cardholders can use it, and most other banks it names are in pilots or tests.
Agents buy more than retail products, too: Stripe Projects lets AI agents buy cloud services for the people they work for.
Every Row On This Page Comes From Each Company's Documentation, Rechecked Monthly
Every row in the tables and every protocol entry comes from each company's documentation, help centres, official blogs and newsrooms, changelogs and the protocols' public code. Where a company does not say something, this page says so instead of guessing. "Announced" and "live" are kept apart, and a launch does not count as people using it.
My tests of Shopify Catalog (the ingredients, reviews and intent results) ran on Shopify's open catalog search on 13 and 15 October 2026, and the count of UCP files on 17 October 2026. The raw search results are published for 13 October and 15 October. The ingredient page check and the file count are not published.
The page is updated monthly. The date at the top shows when it was last checked.