Articles

Notes on the shift from clicks to answers.

Field briefings on agentic commerce, AI discovery, and what the change means for businesses that still depend on being found. New pieces as they're written.

A neoclassical county courthouse with white columns photographed from below against a clear blue sky, standing in for the federal appeals ruling that AI shopping agents acting for a person may reach a retailer's site.

Aug 10, 2026 · 6 min read

Amazon couldn't keep an AI shopping agent out. Neither can you.

A federal appeals court threw out Amazon's block on Perplexity's shopping agent, holding that the shopper does the accessing. Blocking is off the table, and what you publish for agents is the control that's left.

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A hand holding an access card up to a wall-mounted card reader beside a locked door, standing in for the sign-in step an AI agent has to clear before it can act on a customer's behalf.

Aug 3, 2026 · 6 min read

Eleven thousand stores agents can read. Fifteen they can log into.

Adobe just made agent-readable catalogs a built-in feature, and a crawl of 11,414 stores on the agent standard found 15 that can sign a customer in and none that can take an agent's payment.

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A shop worker scans a wine bottle with a handheld device whose screen shows the product's name, price, and units per case, standing in for the structured record an AI agent needs before it can buy.

Jul 27, 2026 · 6 min read

Someone finally graded the shelves: seven in ten stores failed

An audit scored 141 product pages at 29 leading retailers against the agent-commerce spec, and seven in ten fail on the same three fields: price validity, delivery time, and return window.

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A hand making a contactless card payment on a small terminal, standing in for AI agents that can now complete a purchase from start to finish.

Jul 20, 2026 · 6 min read

The money went live: agents can now buy, if they can read you

The payment rails for AI agents went live this cycle, and Adobe scored retail product pages 66 out of 100 for machine readability, about a third invisible to AI at the moment of purchase.

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A stadium scoreboard listing team names down two ranked columns under a clear blue sky, standing in for the new public ranking that grades retailers on how ready they are for AI shopping agents.

Jul 13, 2026 · 6 min read

The rule became a scoreboard: your store now has an AI readiness score

The market stopped describing the rule and started scoring it, a public ranking now grades 1,000 retailers 0 to 100 on whether AI agents can read and buy from them.

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A blue-lit server rack in a data center, rows of drives glowing from behind, representing the trust and verification infrastructure now forming around AI shopping agents.

Jul 9, 2026 · 7 min read

Recommended or skipped: the new rule for AI shopping agents

AI agents can already pay. The fight has moved to trust and readability, a clean, agent-readable feed gets recommended, one without it gets skipped.

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An empty highway swallowed by fog.

Jul 2, 2026 · 8 min read

The click is dying. Here's what replaces it.

Search is turning into an answer machine. The visitor who used to land on your page and act is disappearing, and a September default may decide for you.

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