Glossary
The terms used on this site, defined the way we use them. Figures link to their sources.
Agentic commerce
Shopping in which an AI assistant or agent does part of the buyer’s work: searching, comparing, choosing and sometimes checking out. Most agentic traffic is still browsing — 3.16% of agentic requests reach checkout and payment (HUMAN, April 2026, vendor).
AI visibility
How often, where and how accurately a company appears in the answers of AI assistants. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving it. Visibility counts mentions; it does not say whether the assistant chooses you.
AI shopping agent
Software that acts for a buyer on the web: it opens sites, reads listings, fills carts and may pay. Unlike an assistant’s answer, an agent has to get through your site, so bot management, login walls and pages that render only with JavaScript can stop it.
Routing share
Our measure of where assistants send buyers for a given intent: the share of repeated answers that point to each platform or store. It is a versioned index of model behaviour, not market share.
Mentioned vs chosen
Being named in an answer is not the same as being picked. We report both: how often a brand or seller is mentioned, and how often it is the option the assistant recommends or the agent buys.
Bot management
Edge and anti-bot systems that decide which automated visitors may load a site. They often block agents that robots.txt allows: 29 of 200 retailers refused an automated browser, and 24 of them allowed AI crawlers in robots.txt (Blend Commerce, 2026, vendor).
MCP
The Model Context Protocol, an open protocol that lets AI applications call tools and read data from other services. A marketplace’s MCP server lets assistants search its listings directly instead of scraping them.
ACP
The Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard from OpenAI and Stripe for letting an agent complete a purchase with a merchant on the buyer’s behalf.
UCP
The Universal Commerce Protocol, an open protocol for agentic shopping in which a merchant describes what agents can do on its store in a file at /.well-known/ucp. Adoption is still early: in May 2026 the file was found on only 26 of more than 3 million sites (PPC Land, May 2026, vendor).
llms.txt
A Markdown file at the root of a site that lists its pages for language models, with a short description of each. Ours lists every page of this site.