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.

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.

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