How brands can connect with customers who are shopping alongside AI agents

You’ve spent years perfecting how your brand shows up to shoppers. The right imagery, the right copy, the right moment. But increasingly, brands need to consider another factor that’s entered the chat: an AI agent that’s researched, compared and formed a recommendation alongside a human shopper. AI-referred traffic to U.S. retailers grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026, and that traffic converts about 42% better than traditional search.¹

More shoppers than ever are discovering brands through conversational agentic experiences. And those agents don’t evaluate the way people do. They synthesize everything available: product details, reviews, pricing, inventory and brand content across every surface. Then they decide whether to recommend it to a consumer.

Advertising leaders explain how they’re connecting with shoppers who are using AI agents.

In a time when consumers have a personal agentic AI shopping partner, brands can connect with them in two ways: by giving agents the richest, most structured information to work with, and by showing up inside the conversational experiences where shopping is already happening.

Structure is the new advantage

Advertisers have already responded quickly to adapt to this new way of shopping.

“Agentic commerce is really accelerating the way that we’re reaching consumers,” says Mike Stone, Chief Strategy Officer at Wpromote. “But just because there’s more data doesn’t mean it’s more effective. It’s about how you structure the data, get insights, unlock that and unleash scale.”

Agents pull from every available source to build a picture of your brand. Inconsistent product information, sparse descriptions or missing context aren’t just missed opportunities. They’re reasons an agent passes you over. The brands surfacing in agent recommendations are the ones that have organized their information so clearly that an AI can confidently stand behind what it tells a shopper.

But brands should keep in mind why AI agents recommend certain products, says Jeremy Cornfeldt, President of Tinuiti.

“The most important thing with AI is there’s natural bias built in,” Cornfeldt says. “It wants opinions. If we believe we’ve got the best product, we have to say it – but we also have to say why. That’s going to influence how agents determine what to recommend.”

Think of your content as a conversation with an agent

Sönke Hansen, CEO and Founder of ameo, compares the rise of agentic shopping to the early days of SEO. “When you have great content that meets the need of your customer and describes your product well,” Hansen says, “it will work very well for agentic commerce as agents try to be more human.”

The brands that won in search weren’t just stuffing keywords. They were creating genuinely helpful content. Same principle here. Agents reward usefulness. And the content that’s most useful is also the most complete.

“In the world of AI, more is more,” says Mike Feldman, SVP of Commerce at Flywheel. “I would be putting more information into your brand registry because that’s going to be the fuel AI needs to draw the right information for the right consumer in that right moment.”

Richer registry details, complete A+ content, substantive reviews. This is what gives an agent confidence. Not volume for volume’s sake, but depth that makes the recommendation easy.

“For AI agents to discover your brand, you can’t just update the PDP,” says Sunava Dutta, CPO at Pacvue. “You’ve got to be in more spaces, more organically active, and make sure your product is in stock, has velocity, is priced properly. Then you’ll be part of the AI agent consideration cycle.”

Be ready to engage customers through conversation

Beyond building the foundation to make your brand more discoverable to AI agents, it’s just as important to show up inside the conversations consumers are already having.

“We understand that there’s a world out there where agents are going to discover products on behalf of humans,” says Chad Stoller, VP of Media at PMG. “Humans are out there, they’re initiating these agents. They’re the ones that are essentially describing what it is that they may be looking for. They’re often motivated by price or in some cases they’re also just motivated by initial discovery, trying to get recommendations of top products.”

Agentic commerce is projected to reach $3 to $5 trillion globally by 2030, and 45% of consumers already use AI for some part of the buying journey.^{2, 3} In May, Amazon brought together two powerful AI experiences, Rufus, the expert shopping assistant used by over 300 million customers in 2025, and Alexa+, the personalized AI assistant available across hundreds of millions of devices, into a single, unified experience: Alexa for Shopping.

As more consumers adopt agentic AI tools for shopping, brands have new ways to meet them in the moment. Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands prompts on Alexa for Shopping put brands inside these conversations naturally. On Alexa+, where customers can complete everyday tasks across shopping, entertainment and local services right from their home, Amazon Ads has introduced Alexa+ Conversational Ads and Prime Video Sponsored Tiles.

Alexa+ Agentic Ads go a step further. A shopper can discover something, ask questions about it, and buy it without ever leaving the conversation. That simplicity is good for customers and it puts advertisers right at the point of purchase. Concert ads, for example, can appear on a consumer’s Echo Show. They can ask Alexa about an upcoming show, check seat availability, get pricing, book the seats and have the tickets delivered to their Ticketmaster account, all through a simple conversation.

Agentic commerce doesn’t reward louder marketing. It rewards better information and more natural ways of connecting with consumers. The brands that structure their content for agents, show up consistently across surfaces, and engage customers inside the conversations they’re already having will be the ones that earn recommendations, not just impressions.

This is still early. The brands that start building these habits now, treating every piece of content as a case they’re making to an AI agent and every ad as a natural extension of a shopper’s conversation, won’t just be ready for what’s next. They’ll be shaping it.

Sources

¹ Adobe Analytics, April 2026.

² Salesforce + Publicis Sapient, May 2026.

³ IBM Institute for Business Value, January 2026.