How do you sell to an AI shopper? US brands rethink their pitch with logic and data

Published Sun, Oct 4, 2026 · 10:23 AM

WHEN an AI agent goes shopping, how does it decide what to buy?

That’s the big question on every marketing executive’s mind as customers increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for recommendations and as new AI agents from Meta and OpenAI offer to help anyone send a chatbot shopping on their behalf.

A new category of startup is vying to help brands figure it out. Straddling the line between tech and marketing, its strategies depart sharply from traditional advertising.

“When you advertise to humans, you target eyeballs, emotions and dopamine, but when you advertise to agents, you advertise to logic, a very mathematical logic,” said Aviv Shamny, co-founder and CEO of Limy, a “AI search platform” backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Not long ago, most websites blocked bots. Some stores, like Amazon, are also blocking some AI agent shoppers. But many retailers and brands want to cater to AI. Traffic to US retail sites from AI sources increased 393 per cent in 2026, according to a report from Adobe.

Experts envision a more agent-centric future. By 2030, “agent-influenced spend” might constitute up to 20 per cent of total US e-commerce, or US$385 billion, according to Morgan Stanley research.

“More and more, you’ll just need to click ‘buy’ in the AI chat interface – you’ll never go to a brand’s site,” said Jeff Blackman, managing director at Barbarian Group, a marketing agency that is leaning into AI. “The risk of not being prepared could mean you won’t show up.”

Agentic commerce

Tyler Ackerman, CEO of RTA Store, a family-owned online cabinetry retailer, decided to invest in his company’s AI visibility in 2025, after team members noticed that the company was not showing up in large language model recommendations anymore.

“If we’re not focusing on ‘How do we have our products read easily by these agents fast and securely?’, then we’re left behind,” Ackerman said.

The RTA Store paid US$15,000 to New Generation, a San Francisco startup that promises to transform companies’ “static product catalogues into structured data and generative interfaces that AI can understand.”

New Generation made a number of changes to Ackerman’s website, which he says have worked, from its basic code to adding an AI widget that fields product inquiries (from both human and non-human.) But it also added reams of content describing the intricacies of each product offering – something that AI marketing experts often suggest.

Agents “read” more than human shoppers, preferring “content that’s very factual, straightforward and with lots of statistics,” said Caelean Barnes, whose two-year-old startup, Gauge, also focuses on companies that want to make their products more noticeable to AI agents. “You need to make sure the facts about your business are readily available to agents across all the different surfaces they might look at.”

In practice, this means more output: more product descriptions, more blog posts and more social media activity.

And sites should be seamless for agents to peruse. New Generation, in partnership with Visa, rates a brand website’s “readiness for interacting with agents” from 1 to 100 by simulating agents’ attempts to navigate it. The score helps brands see what agents can handle and where they get stuck.

“Say you’re a bank and agents are asking about your credit card interest rates,” said Jonathan Arena, New Generation’s CEO. “Then a shopper is like, ‘Hey, I want to apply for your top-tier credit card’ but that run failed because their agent couldn’t access the application form. You just lost a customer.”

Technical tricks

Some strategies are exceptionally technical. Shamny said Limy focuses on how AI systems represent language as a series of numbers called vectors. A prompt like “best running shoes for a marathon” gets mapped to a numerical representation of its meaning.

A website’s content can also be represented numerically, and Limy helps “identify the vector spaces agents are interested in.” (The startup also identifies brands’ MVPs – the most valuable prompts – which result in the most purchases).

Not everyone is enamoured of such wizardry.

The models are changing “faster than our ability to try to game them,” said Toby Coulthard, founder of Jacquard, an AI marketing platform. “Maybe these recommendations are going to be true for the next two months but not after that. You have to take it back down to fundamental marketing principles.”

Akshat Trivedi, an industry analyst with FTI Consulting, sees parallels to both the mobile commerce transition and search engine optimisation bonanza. First movers earned big gains. But eventually, when everyone got there, the market equalised. What is different now, he said, is the speed at which companies are racing to get ahead of what seems to be a new marketing paradigm.

“Soon we might see products that launch first on AI or discoverability that is driven by brands named in such a way that AI picks them up more than others,” said Trivedi.

That likely means more marketing budget disappears into the agentic frontier. Ackerman, at the RTA Store, envisions some day soon spending up to US$12,000 a month to catch the attention of his bot clientele. “As these systems get more intelligent, we’re going to have no choice but to spend a bit more,” he said. NYTIMES