# Agentic commerce: how AI agents will buy from your brand

Being *recommended* by an AI assistant is the visible half of the shift. The quieter, larger half is transaction: assistants and autonomous agents that don't just name a product but **discover it, compare it, and complete the purchase** on the buyer's behalf. When the agent — not the human — is the one navigating your store, a different set of things has to be true.

Most sites are built for a person with eyes, a cursor, and patience. An agent has none of those. It reads structured data, follows documented endpoints, and gives up fast when a flow assumes a human.

## What an agent needs to buy

To transact, an agent has to answer a sequence of machine questions about your catalog — and find unambiguous answers:

- **What is this product?** A [`Product` schema](https://schema.org/Product) with a stable identifier, not just a pretty page.
- **What does it cost, and is it available?** Explicit `price`, `priceCurrency`, and `availability` — in markup, not baked into an image.
- **Can it ship to me, and what are the terms?** Shipping, returns, and policies it can read, not infer.
- **How do I actually complete this?** A path to checkout (or a handoff) that doesn't depend on a logged-in human clicking through a cart.

If any of those answers is missing or buried, the agent does the rational thing: it picks a competitor that answered cleanly.

## The protocols to watch

A small stack of emerging standards is forming the rails for this:

- **ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)** — conventions for agents to browse catalogs and initiate purchases.
- **UCP (Universal Commerce Protocol)** — interoperable product, price, and availability data across stores.
- **[MCP (Model Context Protocol)](https://modelcontextprotocol.io)** — the increasingly common way assistants connect to external tools and data, including commerce surfaces.

You don't need to bet on a single winner. What they share is the underlying demand: **structured, authoritative, machine-readable commerce data** plus a documented way to act on it. Get that right and you're ready for whichever protocol your buyers' agents speak.

## How to get ready — without rebuilding your store

1. **Make your catalog legible.** Complete `Product`/`Offer` schema with price, currency, availability, and SKUs on every product.
2. **Publish your terms as data.** Shipping and returns an agent can parse, not just a PDF.
3. **Don't block the agents.** Many stores quietly disallow AI fetchers in [`robots.txt`](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9309) and never realize they've opted out of the channel.
4. **Expose an authoritative layer.** A machine-readable manifest of what you sell, where, and how to transact — so an agent gets the truth from you, not a guess.
5. **Keep it current.** Agents act on what they read; stale price or stock data converts into wrong orders or abandoned ones.

## Why now

This won't arrive all at once, and it won't replace human shoppers. But the brands that are transactable by agents *early* get a structural advantage: they're the default an assistant can actually complete, while competitors are still a link a human has to chase. The cost of getting ready is mostly markup and discipline — cheap insurance against being the store the agent couldn't use.

Want to know whether an agent could discover, price, and check out from your site today? [Run a free Legible report](/) — commerce readiness is one of the eight dimensions it scores, with the fixes to close the gaps.