Traffic from AI engines to retail sites was up 4,700% year over year as of last July, according to Adobe, and while global ecommerce is on track for $6.88 trillion this year, the bigger change for how you build is who's doing the buying. Shoppers are researching more, comparing more, and increasingly handing the work to AI agents that shortlist products or complete the purchase outright, and about a third of consumers already say they'd let AI buy on their behalf. This past Prime Day, Adobe found that AI chatbot referrals converted 40% better than search, email, or social, which was the first time AI traffic out-converted every other channel instead of trailing it.
Most brands, though, have product data, content, and checkout flows built for a human scanning a page, with bullets written to catch an eye, images that assume someone is looking, and A+ content meant to persuade a person mid-scroll. When an AI agent is the one reading and deciding, much of that effort goes unused, because the agent is parsing structured data and clear claims rather than taking in your hero image.
You don't have to trade the human shopper away to build for AI, since the same listing can hold up for both when you get a few things right. The agent pulls from attributes rather than impressions, so complete and consistent detail-page data, covering materials, dimensions, use cases, and compatibility, is what gets you onto an AI shortlist, since a gap a human would forgive is one a machine simply skips. The claims you make need to be ones an AI can verify and repeat, because "best-selling" means little to an agent while "unscented, 40-count, dermatologist-tested" is something it can match to a request, so it helps to write for the question a shopper would ask out loud. Your reviews and Q&A are the corpus the AI leans on to decide whether you fit, which means sparse or off-topic reviews leave it guessing, and it moves on to the product it understands better.
Agentic traffic is still small today, under 1% of retail visits by most counts, but it's already converting ahead of every other channel, and the brands that build one channel to work for both the human and the machine are the ones who will hold the shelf as that share grows. That's the work we run for the brands we manage, and it's where we would start with yours.