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Guides to selling through AI agents.
How agentic commerce actually works, and how to make your business discoverable, understandable, and bookable by the agents doing the buying.
Product feeds for AI agents: what they read, and why yours has to agree with itself
A product feed used to be a shopping-ads chore. In 2026 it is the input that decides whether AI agents can find, compare, and buy from you at all. The catch is that your catalog now exists in three places at once, and agents check them against each other.
Aug 26, 2026 · 12 min readAgentic commerceHow AI agents actually pay: two payment worlds, and only one of them is yours
Almost every article about agent payments blends two unrelated problems into one story, which is why the advice reads as urgent and turns out to be unactionable. An agent buying a mattress for a person and an agent buying an API call for itself use different rails, different money, and different trust models. Here is the split, what is genuinely live in August 2026, and the honest answer about which half you can ignore.
Aug 24, 2026 · 13 min readAgent readinessWhich AI crawlers should you allow? The robots.txt decision most sites make by accident
The publisher version of this question is about compensation. The small-business version is much simpler, and the risk runs the other way: almost every site that is invisible to AI agents got that way without ever deciding to be. Here is the decision, bot by bot, plus the three blocks people set without realizing.
Aug 21, 2026 · 11 min readAgentic commerceWhat happened to ChatGPT Instant Checkout, and what merchants should do now
OpenAI shut down in-chat checkout in March 2026, about five months after launching it. The protocol underneath survived, the shopping surface did not, and a lot of published advice still tells merchants to enroll in a program that no longer exists. Here is the accurate picture.
Aug 20, 2026 · 11 min readGuidesAI search for restaurants and local businesses: where the recommendation actually comes from
Ask an assistant for the best taco place nearby and it names one to three, not ten. Winning that shortlist works differently than every other kind of AI visibility, because for local questions your own website is not the primary source. Here is what is, and what to do about it.
Aug 17, 2026 · 11 min readAgent readinessHow to measure AI agent traffic (when your analytics cannot see it)
Google Analytics reports zero AI crawler visits no matter how many you get, because crawlers do not run JavaScript. That is one of three separate blind spots, each needing a different instrument. Here is the full measurement stack, with the user agents, the queries, and the verification step most guides skip.
Aug 16, 2026 · 11 min readAgentic commerceWhat is Google UCP? The Universal Commerce Protocol, explained for merchants
UCP is the open standard Google and Shopify built so AI agents can search, cart, and buy from your store inside Gemini and AI Mode. Here is what it actually does, how to get on it, and what an independent census of every public UCP store says about where the ecosystem really stands.
Aug 20, 2026 · 11 min readGuidesWhat is agent.json? The file name five different standards are fighting over
Search for "agent.json" and you will find at least four unrelated specifications answering to a similar name. This guide untangles them, explains what a business actually needs to publish, and shows the shape a good one takes.
Aug 12, 2026 · 10 min readAgent readinessWe scanned 652 small-business websites. 31% are invisible to AI agents.
Original data from a neutral, reproducible sample of real SMB websites across restaurants, health, home trades, personal care, and independent retail. Nearly a third offer AI agents nothing machine-readable at all, and not a single site in the sample exposes a surface an agent could act on. Here is the data, industry by industry, with the full methodology so you can check our work.
Aug 10, 2026 · 11 min readAgentic commerceWhat is agentic commerce? A plain-English guide for 2026
Agentic commerce is shopping where an AI agent, not a human with a browser, does the discovering, comparing, and increasingly the buying. Here is how a machine-mediated purchase actually works, what the market data really shows, and what merchants should do about it now.
Aug 20, 2026 · 11 min readAgent readinessGenerative engine optimization: the evidence-based GEO guide for 2026
GEO is the practice of getting your content cited inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews. The field is drowning in vendor claims, so this guide sticks to what the research actually shows moves citations, what does not, and how to do the work in priority order.
Aug 10, 2026 · 10 min readGuidesWhat is an MCP server? A plain-English guide for business owners
An MCP server is how you give AI assistants buttons to press instead of pages to read: check availability, quote a price, book the slot. Here is what the Model Context Protocol actually is, who supports it, what a merchant server exposes, and how to get one without an engineering team.
Aug 10, 2026 · 9 min readGuidesHow to get your business recommended by ChatGPT
When someone asks ChatGPT for the best option in your category, it names a handful of businesses and explains why. Getting into that handful is not luck and cannot be bought. Here are the two systems behind ChatGPT recommendations and the concrete work that influences each one.
Aug 20, 2026 · 10 min readAgent readinessJSON-LD for AI agents: the schema markup that actually gets read
JSON-LD is the highest-leverage hour in the entire agent-readiness stack: typed, machine-verifiable facts about your business embedded in your pages. This is the practical version, with copy-paste templates for the types that matter, the implementation rules that keep them trusted, and the mistakes that get markup ignored.
Aug 10, 2026 · 10 min readAgentic commerceHow AI agents find, compare, and book service businesses in 2026
Most advice about "getting recommended by ChatGPT" stops at discovery. This is the full pipeline: where agents source local recommendations, how they pick a winner, and what actually happens when one tries to book and pay.
Jul 13, 2026 · 9 min readGuidesHow to sell on ChatGPT without Shopify or Etsy (2026 guide)
ChatGPT shopping is not a marketplace you sign up for. It is an answer engine that recommends whatever it can read and trust, and since March 2026 the purchase itself happens on your site rather than in the chat. Here is how it sources those answers, the realistic routes in, and the checklist worth doing this week.
Aug 20, 2026 · 10 min readAgentic commerceACP in 2026: what the Agentic Commerce Protocol is now that Instant Checkout is gone
If you came here looking for how to enroll in ChatGPT Instant Checkout, the honest answer is that there is nothing to enroll in. OpenAI retired it in March 2026. The protocol underneath survived and is still worth understanding, so here is what ACP actually is now, what is worth building, and what to stop chasing.
Aug 20, 2026 · 10 min readAgentic commerceUCP vs ACP vs MCP: which agentic-commerce rails matter for your business?
Three protocols now decide whether AI agents can find your business and pay you. Here is what each one actually does, who runs it, what it costs you to support, and the honest order to adopt them in.
Aug 20, 2026 · 9 min readAgent readinessWhat is llms.txt, and do you actually need one in 2026?
The honest answer is nuanced: llms.txt is a ten-minute, zero-risk addition with no evidence behind it, sitting inside an agent-readiness stack where other artifacts demonstrably matter more. Here is what the file is, what the data shows, and what to prioritize.
Jul 13, 2026 · 9 min read