AI-driven traffic to ecommerce websites is starting to become measurable, and some interesting figures from John Lewis & Partners and Shopify suggest that agentic commerce is moving beyond experimentation and starting to influence how people find, research and compare products online.
John Lewis says searches from AI agents now make up 2.5% of its total search volume, compared with just 0.3% a year earlier. That means the proportion has increased more than eightfold in just the past 12 months. The Wall Street Journal has also reported that AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores tripled year on year during the second quarter. Neither figure suggests traditional search or browsing an ecommerce website is disappearing any time soon, but the rate of growth is enough for ecommerce businesses to start paying attention.
For years, we’ve built ecommerce websites around two main audiences: the customer and Google. Agentic commerce introduces a third audience, the AI software helping customers research, compare and decide what to buy.
What is agentic commerce?
Agentic commerce is the use of AI agents to help consumers find, compare, select and, increasingly, buy products. Rather than visiting several websites, browsing categories and comparing products themselves, someone might ask an AI assistant to “find me a waterproof running jacket under £100 that is suitable for running a half marathon”. The AI can research available products, compare specifications, look at reviews and prices and present a shortlist based on what that person has asked for.
As these systems develop, AI will handle an increasing number of steps in the buying journey. For your ecommerce business, this creates an important question: can an AI agent understand your site and products well enough to recommend them? If your product information is incomplete, inconsistent or difficult for software to interpret, you risk being overlooked, let alone even discovered
Shopify is seeing the same increase
The Wall Street Journal reported that AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores tripled year on year in Q2, while Shopify itself continues to invest in AI and agentic commerce capabilities for their sellers
Having a Shopify store alone isn’t enough to take advantage of this shift. The quality and structure of the underlying ecommerce data still matters, and the same principle applies to WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and custom ecommerce platforms. An AI agent needs reliable information to understand a catalogue, compare products and decide whether something meets the customer’s requirements.
Your product catalogue matters more in an AI (agentic) world
A traditional product page has largely been designed to persuade a human while giving Google enough information to understand and rank the page. Agentic commerce adds another requirement. Product information needs to be clear enough for AI software to interpret, compare and use when answering detailed questions.
That means accurate product names and descriptions, prices, availability, specifications, attributes, variants, delivery information, returns policies, reviews and FAQs all become increasingly important. Structured product data matters too. The clearer the relationships between products, categories and variants are, the easier you make the job of software trying to understand your catalogue.
There is a significant overlap here between good ecommerce SEO and preparing for agentic commerce. Businesses that already maintain detailed, accurate and well-structured product information are starting from a much stronger position than those with thin product descriptions, missing attributes and inconsistent catalogue data.
Top 5 tips for getting your ecommerce site ready for agentic commerce
- Separate referrals from the main AI tools in your analytics. This will help you identify how much traffic they send, where visitors arrive and whether they convert. Record this now so you have a benchmark for the next 3, 6 and 12 months. If you use Shopify, this may be a challenge with their recent changes, but there are ways you can mitigate this
- Ask ChatGPT (for example) the same questions a customer might ask when researching a product that they want to buy. Try searches based on budget, requirements and product comparisons. Check whether your products appear, which competitors are recommended and whether the information given is accurate. Ask the tool what you can do to improve your site to be more visible.
- Make sure your key products have clear descriptions, attributes, properly named variants, availability… all the same things you would do back in the day with eBay. Start with your bestselling and highest-value products rather than trying to update your entire catalogue at once.
- Make sure AI systems and search engines can clearly read your reviews – it is a way to assure the tools that you are a reputable seller
- You don’t have to rebuild your site… potentially! Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and custom ecommerce sites can all play a role in agentic commerce. New services such as Juspay Breeze Universal are already being developed to connect existing catalogues with AI platforms, but be wary of the new companies cropping up that are offering the earth with little track record.
Agentic commerce is in its early days, but it is important
There will be a lot written about agentic commerce over the next few years and plenty of products claiming to solve the problem. I wouldn’t make a major technology decision based purely on the expectation that AI agents are about to transform ecommerce overnight.
I also wouldn’t ignore what is happening. When a major UK retailer reports an eightfold increase in searches from AI agents and one of the world’s largest ecommerce platforms sees AI-driven traffic triple, we have enough evidence to start measuring the change.
The first step for most ecommerce businesses is straightforward. Find out whether AI is already sending customers to your website, understand what those visitors are doing when they arrive and check what AI platforms are saying about your products. Then make sure the software helping customers make buying decisions has accurate, structured information to work with.
At Courageous, we’re looking closely at how agentic commerce, AI discovery and ecommerce SEO are changing the way customers find and buy products online. If you’d like us to look at how prepared your ecommerce website is for agentic commerce, get in touch.
