Is 2026 the Beginning of Agentic Shopping?

Amazon HQ should be nervous. The “Everything Store” model that dominated the last two decades is being quietly unbundled, not by another marketplace, but by AI agents that can discover, compare, and buy on the shopper’s behalf. Agentic commerce is here—and it changes everything about how products get found and sold.

From Search to Agentic Shopping

For 20 years, e‑commerce strategy revolved around one idea: attract traffic.

You fought to rank in Google, competed for ad impressions, optimized product pages, and played the marketplace game on Amazon. The customer journey started with a search box and a click to your website.

That assumption is now breaking.

AI agents—Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and what follows—are becoming the new “homepage.” Instead of typing a product keyword into a browser, users describe their intent in natural language: “I need a week’s worth of healthy meals for a family of four,” “I want a minimalist standing desk for a small apartment,” or “Plan a complete camping trip for next weekend, including gear.” The agent does everything: research, shortlist, compare, and increasingly, checkout right inside the conversation.

This is the core shift from “Search” to “Agentic Shopping.” The user no longer moves from search results to websites; the agent orchestrates the entire shopping journey end‑to‑end.

January 2026: The Week Everything Shifted

The theoretical future of agentic commerce turned into concrete product announcements in January 2026. Three moves in particular signaled a new phase.

Google & Walmart: UCP and Gemini

Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that lets AI agents talk directly to retailers’ systems for discovery, pricing, availability, and checkout. UCP is not just a tracking link or affiliate tag; it is an integration layer built for AI-native commerce flows. Retailers like Walmart, Target, Shopify, Etsy, and others are already in the first wave of partners.

At the same time, Google and Walmart announced a deep integration inside Gemini. This allows shoppers to:

• Ask Gemini for products or shopping help.
• See relevant items from U.S. retailers, including Walmart, with real-time data.
• Move from suggestion to purchase without ever leaving the AI experience.

The practical result: a user can stay inside Gemini, have the agent plan, recommend, and then complete the purchase via UCP-powered checkout, with payments handled through systems like Google Pay and, in time, PayPal. The traditional “search, click to site, add to cart” flow is being compressed into an invisible, agent-managed pipeline.

OpenAI: ChatGPT as a Frictionless Mall

OpenAI is pushing in the same direction with Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.

Instant Checkout lets users buy products directly from within a ChatGPT conversation. The rollout has started with Etsy and a massive base of Shopify merchants, with multi-item carts and broader integrations on the roadmap. The vision is straightforward: ChatGPT becomes a conversational mall where the “Buy” action is just another part of the dialogue.

Instead of sending users to a separate product page, ChatGPT:

• Understands intent and constraints (budget, style, timing).
• Surfaces a small, relevant set of options from integrated merchants.
• Lets the user complete the purchase without leaving the chat.

Commentary around these launches makes it clear that large retailers such as Walmart are part of the long-term plan, and some partnerships have already been publicly discussed. The direction of travel is unmistakable: less browsing, more delegating; less clicking, more “just handle this for me.”

Perplexity: “Buy with Pro” Bypasses the Old Flow

Perplexity has moved early with its own agentic commerce feature: “Buy with Pro.”

For Perplexity Pro users in the U.S., certain queries now turn the assistant into a personal shopper. Perplexity:

• Pulls products from participating merchants and retailers.
• Presents curated options in response to natural-language prompts.
• Enables one‑click checkout for eligible items right inside Perplexity.

This experience effectively bypasses the classic marketplace model where users browse pages of listings. Instead, a single AI interface handles the entire process, from need articulation to payment. For merchants plugged into Perplexity’s ecosystem, it is a new performance channel. For those who are not, it is a blind spot.

The Zero-Click Threat: When Your Site Stops Being the Destination

All three moves share one theme: zero-click commerce.

In the old world, success meant “getting the click” to your website or Amazon listing. In the new world, the click may never happen:

1. The agent fetches structured data about your product.
2. It evaluates price, availability, attributes, and reviews against the user’s goal.
3. It decides whether to surface your product—or a competitor’s—in the conversation.
4. The purchase completes inside the AI interface.
5. Your website becomes infrastructure, not the main stage.

This is the real threat: if your brand is not integrated into AI-first protocols and ecosystems—like UCP for Gemini, Instant Checkout pipelines for ChatGPT, or merchant programs for Perplexity—you disappear at the very moment that matters most: the agent’s recommendation. The user never “fails to click” your result; your product simply never gets proposed.

In other words, visibility is no longer just about being indexable by search engines. It is about being legible and trustworthy to AI agents that now mediate discovery and purchasing.

The D2C Reality Check: Opportunity and Risk

For D2C brands, this is both a risk and a historic opportunity.

On one hand, it offers a path to reduce dependence on Amazon’s marketplace and its associated “tax.” If AI agents can send customers directly to your checkout or transact on your behalf using shared protocols, you can reach new buyers without relying solely on Amazon’s internal search and ad stack.

On the other hand, the bar for participation is higher and more technical. To win in agentic commerce, brands must rethink their foundation:

• Clean, rich product data: AI agents do not “see” your beautiful lifestyle imagery or elaborate landing pages the way humans do. They parse structured data: titles, attributes, dimensions, materials, use cases, compatibility, safety notes, pricing, availability, shipping rules, and more. If this data is incomplete, inconsistent, or locked in PDFs and unstructured copy, you lose ranking potential inside AI recommendations.
• Technical integrations and protocols: It is no longer enough to upload a basic product feed. Brands need robust, real-time integrations—APIs, feeds, and protocol-level connections like UCP—so that AI agents can query live stock/prices, confirm delivery times, and execute transactions reliably. The brands that wire themselves into these rails early will become the “default options” for agentic systems.
• Brand governance in AI sales agents: AI assistants are becoming your new sales reps. That means they will describe your positioning, compare you to competitors, and answer objections in their own words—unless you shape that behavior. Brands must begin to treat AI agent behavior as a governed surface. What claims should the AI make? How should tradeoffs be framed? Governance will become as important as brand guidelines for human sales and support teams.

For D2C leaders, the question is no longer “Should we care about AI assistants?” but “How quickly can we make our catalog and brand truly agent-ready?”

Why Traditional SEO Tools Are Now Blind

Most existing SEO and analytics tools were built for a world of:

• Ten blue links on a search results page.
• Ad slots you can bid on.
• Clicks and impressions as the primary metrics.

They are almost entirely focused on how your brand appears in conventional search and on your own domain. What they do not show you:

• How Gemini describes your flagship product when a user does not mention your brand by name.
• Which competitors ChatGPT prefers when asked for “the best option for [your use case].”
• Whether Perplexity surfaces your product at all when a user searches within a category you care about.
• How missing attributes or inconsistent data cause the AI to misclassify your product or exclude it from certain comparisons.

In an agentic world, these are the questions that matter. If you cannot see how AI systems perceive and rank your catalog, you are operating blind.

How Sanbi.ai Helps You Survive the Shift

This is the gap Sanbi.ai was created to address.

At Sanbi.ai, the focus is on Agentic Commerce visibility—on understanding how your products and brand appear inside AI assistants such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and how that differs from your traditional search footprint.

Sanbi.ai builds enterprise-grade, custom audit tools that:

• Map how AI agents actually talk about your products across different intents and contexts.
• Identify missing or weak product attributes that prevent your items from being recommended.
• Highlight integration gaps—where your feeds, APIs, or protocol participation are insufficient for agentic checkout flows.
• Reveal how AI “sees” your catalog versus how you want it to be positioned.

Instead of guessing how these systems treat your brand, you get a concrete, structured view—and a roadmap for remediation.

If your brand wants to stay visible as commerce shifts from search pages to AI agents, now is the time to adapt. Don’t wait for your traffic to erode before discovering that, in the eyes of AI, your catalog is incomplete, misclassified, or simply absent.

You can run a free audit today, or explore our Enterprise Options for global brands.

Reach out directly at: aditya@sanbi.ai

Agentic commerce is not a distant future; the infrastructure is being rolled out right now. The brands that move first will define what “default” looks like in the age of AI shopping.