John Readman is the CEO of ASK BOSCO, which gives online retailers and marketing agencies the power of AI predictive marketing analytics.
AI is transforming how brands approach e-commerce. Generative AI has democratized content creation, making it easier and more affordable for challenger brands to scale their online stores. Machine learning algorithms are helping marketing teams sort and analyze complex first-party datasets at a rapid pace. With the introduction of agentic AI, marketing agility can reach new heights through increased personalization and automated decision making.
It’s not just brands starting to benefit from agentic models, though. Agentic AI shopping assistants are streamlining the buying process, and shoppers are receiving more personalized recommendations tailored to their needs. It’s now up to brands to adapt to this revolution.
What’s Changed?
Instead of shoppers having to conduct extensive research involving different devices and browsers, new AI-powered search engines can do the work for them. Perplexity already has approximately 22 million active users. The tool is becoming an online research tool for everything from academia to e-commerce.
Now, Perplexity is adapting its model to change the way we buy online. In March, the company partnered with firmly, an agentic commerce platform, to give real-time product availability and enable users to purchase directly on the platform. Not long after the announcement, other big players started announcing their own investments in agentic e-commerce. In April, Amazon launched its Buy for Me feature, allowing users to seamlessly purchase products from other brands or vendors when unavailable on Amazon; an AI agent completes the purchase. Then, in May, Google debuted AI Mode, allowing users to track prices and make automatic purchases.
Agentic commerce is here, whether we like it or not.
What Can Brands Do About It?
With agentic AI removing friction from the buying process and giving consumers advanced research capabilities, it’s more important than ever that e-commerce platforms are set up to perform.
Below are five ways to get ahead of the game. Many of these adjustments are already considered best practices, but there will be an adjustment period as brands learn to optimize for AI-driven processes.
1. Enhance Structured Data And Metadata
To understand and interact with web content, AI agents rely heavily on structured data. Brands must ensure that sites and products are optimized and marked up with the most relevant information. Metadata is still important, but there’s a growing emphasis on crafting clear and detailed product descriptions for AI search engines.
You can further improve clarity for users and search engines by organizing products into defined categories and subcategories. Adding filters will help improve the user experience and make it easier for AI engines to access the most relevant information. Use schema markup across your products, as this simple piece of code presents information, such as reviews, pricing and availability, in a way that is easier for both AI and traditional search engines to understand.
2. Ensure Smooth Communication With APIs
It’s not just the content on your websites that you’ll need to adapt; it’s the application programming interfaces (APIs), too. This means keeping APIs up to date with any changes in product information or pricing. There are now “price scraping” APIs that can collect competitor pricing information so that you can adapt your own pricing in real time.
To enable seamless interactions between AI agents and your platforms, you need to offer endpoints that allow agents to access product information, check inventory and process orders easily. One typical example of an API endpoint is a URL generated by your API for a product. By creating a style guide for URLs generated by your API, you can ensure URLs are optimized and well-structured.
3. Optimize Content For AI-Driven Search
AI tools aim to provide results based on intent, rather than just the words used. This advanced way of managing search relies on a technology called natural language processing (NLP) to identify patterns in language to understand what a user is genuinely looking for. You can optimize your content for NLP by creating pages that focus on user intent and using keywords typically used by shoppers during the transaction phase of their journey. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can help you break down keywords by user intent.
Stay informed about how AI agents influence search behaviors and how you’re performing. Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) tools have built-in features that provide top-level insights. However, there are now also dedicated platforms, such as Otterly, that offer deeper insights into how you’re performing in AI search.
4. Ensure Accessibility And Usability
Design your website in a way that is easy to use not only for shoppers, but for AI agents, too. Simplified navigation structures, intuitive menus and clear language make it easier for AI agents to collect the data on your website.
This also applies to the interactive elements on your website. Test them regularly to ensure they’re functioning and are labeled correctly with code that informs agents of each element’s purpose. And while it may be tempting to pack your website with sharp new features, AI agents will likely find it easier to crawl simple, consistent websites than complicated ones. Dynamic content is excellent for personalizing each user’s experience, but it may confuse AI agents, making your site harder to crawl.
5. Offer Safe Payment Options
Secure, integrated payment processing is crucial. To ensure that you keep customer data safe, you can implement tokenization, which replaces sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, with random token numbers during processing.
The rise of agentic AI in e-commerce presents both challenges and opportunities. By embracing structured data, ensuring that APIs are agent-friendly, optimizing for AI-driven search, ensuring accessibility and integrating secure payment solutions, brands can face the challenge of agentic AI with some much-needed agency.
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