When an A.I. agentic agent goes shopping, how does it decide what to buy? That is the big question on every marketing executive's mind as customers increasingly turn to chatbots for recommendations and as new A.I. agents from Meta and Open AI offer to help anyone send a bot shopping on their behalf. A new category of start-up is vying to help brands figure it out. Straddling the line between tech and marketing, its strategies depart sharply from traditional advertising.
"When you advertise to humans, you target eyeballs, emotions and dopamine, but when you advertise to agents, you advertise to logic, a very mathematical logic," said Aviv Shamny, the co-founder and chief executive of Limy, a "AI search platform" backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Not long ago, most websites blocked bots. Some stores, like Amazon, are also blocking some A.I. agent shoppers. But many retailers and brands want to cater to A.I. Traffic to American retail sites from A.I. sources increased 393 percent in 2026, according to a report from Adobe. Experts envision a more agent-centric future. By 2030, "agent-influenced spend" might constitute up to 20 percent of total U.S. e-commerce, or $385 billion, according to Morgan Stanley research.
"More and more, you’ll just need to click ‘buy’ in the AI. chat interface — you’ll never go to a brand’s site," said Jeff Blackman, the managing director at Barbarian Group, a marketing agency that is leaning into A.I. "The risk of not being prepared could mean you won’t show up."
Tyler Ackerman, the chief executive of the RTA Store, a family-owned online cabinetry retailer, decided to invest in his company's A.I. visibility last year, after team members noticed that the company was not showing up in LLM recommendations anymore. "If we’re not focusing on, ‘How do we have our products read easily by these agents fast and securely?’ then we’re left behind," Ackerman said. The RTA Store paid $15,000 to New Generation, a San Francisco start-up that promises to transform companies' "static product catalogs into structured data and generative interfaces that A.I. can understand."
New Generation made a number of changes to Ackerman's website, which he says have worked, from its basic code to adding an A.I. widget that fields product inquiries (from both human and non.) But it also added reams of content describing the intricacies of each product offering — something that A.I. marketing experts often suggest. Agents "read" more than human shoppers, preferring "content that's very factual, straightforward and with lots of statistics," said Caelean Barnes, whose two-year-old start-up, Gauge, also focuses on companies that want to make their products more noticeable to A.I. agents. "You need to make sure the facts about your business are readily available to agents across all the different surfaces they might look at."
In practice, this means more output: more product descriptions, more blog posts and more social media activity. And sites should be seamless for agents to peruse. New Generation, in partnership with Visa, rates a brand website's "readiness for interacting with agents" from 1 to 100 by simulating agents' attempts to navigate it. The score helps brands see what agents can handle and where they get stuck.
"Say you’re a bank and agents are asking about your credit card interest rates," said Jonathan Arena, the New Generation chief executive. "Then a shopper is like, ‘Hey, I want to apply for your top-tier credit card’ but that run failed because their agent couldn’t access the application form. You just lost a customer."
Source: New York Times Business · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing