Heading into peak shopping season, the shoppers you’re trying to reach are asking ChatGPT and Gemini for gift ideas, and plenty of retailers are wondering whether their products will show up in recommendations. Shopper trust earned in AI today tends to carry forward as AI shopping becomes the norm, according to McKinsey.
That traffic is worth chasing. AI-referred visits to U.S. retail sites converted 60% higher than non-AI traffic in July and generated 53% more revenue per visit, Adobe reports — the 11th straight month AI traffic outperformed on conversion.
For retailers, much of the groundwork for showing up in AI recommendations may already be in place. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, switched on a layer of AI discoverability on the back end of millions of storefronts this year. Chances are, your store already has some of what AI agents need to find your products.
Before the busiest shopping weeks of the year, a few signals can show you exactly where your store stands.
The AI-ready infrastructure already in place
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, standardized how AI agents read a store’s catalog, pricing and availability. Shopify turned it on by default for eligible merchants earlier this year, no setup required. Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite offers a comparable path for merchants on WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace and Etsy as platform partners.
Notably, much of what gets labeled “agentic readiness” is infrastructure that retailers already have. “There’s a lot of new terminology being applied to capabilities and infrastructure that retailers have had for a long time,” says Sucharita Kodali, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. “If you already have the product database, the imagery and the commerce infrastructure, maybe that is enough for a platform to work with.”
The opportunity reaches well beyond the biggest brands. On Shopify, 75% of AI-attributed orders in the second quarter came from outside the platform’s top 100 product categories, a promising sign for specialty retailers.
And sitting it out isn’t really an option. “Waiting doesn’t keep you out of AI shopping,” says Abhay Singhal, co-founder of InMobi, the global technology company behind Glance, and CEO of InMobi Advertising. “It means agents describe you from whatever they could scrape, instead of from your own data.”
Three readiness signals worth checking now
Finding out where your store stands doesn’t require a developer. “Start with a scanner,” Singhal says. Glance’s free tool, Ready, Set, Agent, runs 80 checks on a store’s domain in under a minute, from whether AI bots can get in to whether an agent can reach the catalog, cart and checkout. It then delivers an agent readiness scorecard and a list of pass rates across various categories (e.g., GEO answerability).
Even top scorers have work to do. As of mid-September, the specialty home-design retailer aaltousa.com led, with more than 8,000 sites scanned and a score of 61. Its catalog, cart and checkout were open to agents, yet it failed three of four bot-access checks. “Even the leader has a to-do list, and you can find yours in a minute,” Singhal says.
The first signal is which platform your store is on. Two competitors in the same category can sit at very different stages for that reason alone.
The second is whether your catalog has already synced through your platform’s backend work. Shopify merchants can check under Sales channels, then Agentic, in their admin panel. “It is on by default, so many merchants are already live in ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot without knowing it,” Singhal says. Stripe’s partner platforms get there through its rollout, which may require an opt-in step, like installing an extension.
The third signal is whether an AI agent can read your site. Singhal flags a common misstep: “Blocking shoppers along with scrapers. One ‘block AI bots’ switch can stop the agents that send you customers.” For a quick gut check, ask an AI assistant about one of your products, including its size, today’s price and delivery timing, and compare the answers with your live site.
Becoming visible is only the first stage
“A site an AI can read is not yet a store an agent can shop,” Singhal cautions. He breaks readiness into four stages: discoverable, understandable, actionable and measurable. The signals above cover the first stage, where Kodali says most of the market sits: “In commerce right now, there’s still very little that is truly agentic. What we’re really seeing today is more AI showing up in search and discovery.”
Checkout inside AI chats is still taking shape. Google’s UCP checkout is limited to “eligible U.S. retailers,” with features like multi-item carts still on the roadmap. OpenAI scaled back its Instant Checkout feature in March to focus on product discovery.
For most retailers, the practical move is to lean on the infrastructure Google, Shopify and Stripe are building, rather than race to build proprietary integrations. As Kodali puts it, many of today’s readiness challenges “are solvable problems,” and “some of those capabilities are probably going to become part of the e-commerce platforms retailers already use.”
Turning readiness into a plan
Your next move depends on what the readiness checks reveal. “If you don’t show up, it is an access problem,” Singhal explains. “If you show up wrong, it is a data problem. If the journey breaks, it is a handoff problem. If everything works, measure it.”
As you weigh technology partners for the stages ahead, Singhal suggests asking yourself three questions: “Do I stay the merchant of record, do I keep my customer data and can I leave?” Glance was built around that standard, he says, so brands plug in the product feed they already have and keep their checkout, customer data and purchase experience.
AI shopping is changing month to month, so choose tools that leave room to experiment and adjust while keeping the lift manageable. “I would start with what you already have,” Kodali advises. “As soon as ‘agentic commerce readiness’ means you need a major IT project, you’ve made this much harder.”
With the holidays approaching, progress is more attainable than you might expect. Confirming where your store stands is a realistic goal before the rush. This turns a guess about peak-season performance into a plan you can act on.
Find out where your store stands in under a minute. Check your readiness list twice. Run your domain through Glance’s free Ready, Set, Agent tool to get your readiness score and a list of what to fix before the holiday rush.
