Google Just Confirmed It. Your Next Customer Might Be an AI Agent. | AJ Ghergich, Botify [Part 2 of 3]

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Google just announced Information Agents and Universal Cart at I/O. The timing of this episode couldn't be better.

When AJ Ghergich and I recorded this conversation, agentic commerce was still something most marketers were treating as a future problem. After last week's Google I/O announcements, it's a this-quarter problem — at least for brands paying attention.

AJ leads the consulting and AI team at Botify and works with some of the largest retailers in the world. His take is clear: the AI agent doing research on behalf of your buyer isn't a bot to optimize for. It's a customer to serve. And the brands that understand that now are the ones that will be visible when the transaction layer fully arrives.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 covered why your dashboards are lying to you and what bot traffic is actually doing to your analytics. This conversation picks up with what comes next — and what your brand needs to do before agentic commerce goes mainstream.

In this episode:

• What agentic commerce actually is — and why visibility is the prerequisite that most brands are skipping
• Why this Black Friday could be the first one where agentic commerce affects your revenue numbers (even if it's only 5%)
• AJ's reframe: AI is not a technology layer, it's a customer type — and why that changes everything about how you organize your content
• Attributes vs. intent — why "14-inch wheels" loses to "can this stroller handle the subway and the park" when an agent is making the recommendation
• How to think about AI agent personas the same way you'd build buyer personas (yes, really)
• What smaller brands on Shopify should focus on right now versus what large retailers need to be doing with Google's Universal Commerce Protocol
• Why specificity is the content strategy for agentic commerce — and what that looks like in practice

If you're listening to this and thinking I need someone to lead this for me, that's what I do.

I'm an AI search visibility consultant and a fractional content strategist for startups and enterprise brands. If that sounds like the kind of help you're looking for, email me at cassie@cassieclarkmarketing.com. 

Or request your 7-Day AI Search Visibility Audit: https://cassieclarkmarketing.com/ai-search-visibility-audit/

Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | AI Search Visibility Consultant
Website → https://cassieclarkmarketing.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Hey, welcome back to Found and AI. Before we get into it, I want to give a quick apology to my 6 a.m. listeners, the faithful few. I know some of you have this show in your ears on the way into the office on Tuesday mornings. I did not drop this yesterday for first scheduled upload for 6 a.m. today. Yesterday here in the US was a holiday. I did not touch anything work-related all weekend. I rested. And by rested, I mean I napped a lot. I hope you got some rest in too or some sunshine. It rained here where I am the entire weekend, but it was still a good weekend overall. Anyway, we're back at it today. We have a lot to get into. I'm Cassie Clark, a fractional content strategist and an AI search optimization expert, evidently also a professional napper. This is Found in AI, the show for marketers and founders who want to understand what's actually happening in AI Search, not just the hype that you're seeing on LinkedIn or Reddit or X or wherever you're getting your information. If you listened to last week's episode, you heard part one of my conversation with AJ Gergage, who leads the consulting and AI team at Botify. We got into why her dashboards are lying to you, specifically the bot traffic surge and the shift from clicks a clicks mindset to visibility mindset. If you missed it, definitely go back and listen to it. There was a lot of good information there. In that episode, I mentioned I have the plan to release the AI governance conversation that AJ and I had as part two this week. I'm swapping that order because AJ and I talked in part three about Agentic Commerce, and that lines almost perfectly, almost perfectly, could not have planned it better with what Google announced last week at Google I.O. I'm not gonna wait, make you wait another week for a conversation that is super relevant right now. So I'm gonna go ahead and just reorder, reorder what I had planned and release it now. So here's where we are. Last week, Google I.O. confirmed two very important things that should be on your radar. The first is information agents. Those are background AI agents that monitor the web 24-7. They synthesize updates and surface recommendations to users without a single search query. Users just go in there, they set up something that they want to monitor, and the agents do it continuously over and over and over. The second is Universal Cart. This is built on Google's Universal Commerce Protocol. It's a Gemini powered shopping experience that works across search and eventually YouTube and Gmail. It handles deal tracking, price history, and eventually checkout, all on behalf of the user. The customer is becoming an agent, and the agent is deciding which brands get considered and which brands do not. This is not a 2030 problem. If I had to guess, it's probably not even a 2028 problem. AJ said this pretty clearly. I had him dust off his crystal ball. He told me that this Black Friday will probably be the first Black Friday where agenda commerce could affect your revenue numbers. Maybe it's just 1%, maybe it's 5%, but it's there and it'll probably be noticeable. There's more building in the background too. The Google GEO got dropped recently, and I've had a lot of thoughts on it. I recorded the podcast episode and mentioned it in the Thursday update from last week. I've talked about this on LinkedIn, but specifically the thing I've been thinking about the most is that the narrative that GEO is somehow in competition with SEO, that is not it. It's not it. GEO has never been about replacing SEO. If you look at it from where I'm sitting, this is more about getting ready for exactly the kind of infrastructure Google announced last week. John Mueller, the Google guy, even said it recently too on X. He said websites need to do more than just be a landing spot after discovery. They need to be readable, trustworthy, and useful to systems doing the discovering. Google CEO has also been saying it on repeat. Agents are the future. The L let me try again. The LLMS.txt file discussion, the UPC rollout, the information agents launch, these are all pointing in the same direction. AJ has been watching this longer than most. He's been in it since GPT 2, which was forever ago, it feels like at this point. I'm bringing him back from part two today, which is really part three, because the conversation is one that you need right now. Let's get into it. Okay, I want to talk about the agentic commerce now because I got like itching about that one. And he just like said something that just got me into that one. So uh Addy Osmani, is it I must I hope I'm saying his name correctly, had the Agentic Commerce Optimization framework that he released last week and he's calling that AEO. Have you looked into it yet? Have you have you looked into that one yet or no?

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Yeah, um, yeah, it's funny because that's um that that had been sort of adopted in the new wave SEO community as answer engine optimization. Uh so there's a a little bit of an inside joke there. Um but yeah, that that's um it's a hot topic right now. Um a lot of folks are um trying to prepare, no one wants to be left behind. And I I think it depends on what type and size of the brand that you that you are, um how much you should lean in now. Um so I think the first thing is like people don't really understand what agentic commerce is.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

Okay, so explain it to us like we're five.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Okay, yeah, like a like a golden retriever.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Yeah, golden retriever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Um so the main thing is the prerequisite for all this is visibility. So visible visibility is the prerequisite. Agentic commerce is what happens after visibility. So can AI systems find your content and service it? That's visibility. Can AI agents then compare, evaluate, eventually purchase on behalf of the consumer? That's agentic commerce. So there's a it's a two-parter. It's kind of a, you know, if if an agent can't find you, they can't recommend you. So you have to think about it in two parts. A lot of folks, especially smaller brands, I want them to focus on visibility today because the same thing. You're not visible, you can't you can't have agentic commerce. Um, so focus there. If you're a larger brand or a mid-sized brand, you definitely need to be thinking about this Black Friday will be the first Black Friday where you have the possibility of agentic commerce affecting my numbers. Maybe it's maybe it's 5% of your numbers, but it's going to affect your numbers if you're a bigger player, and you need to be uh be ready. Um, so it's it's on the mind of everybody uh right now that I talk to. Honestly, I can't get out of any kind of consultative consultative conversation with any size brand without agentic commerce coming up.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

So I think I've been very much on the fence about this. Like I've elbow deep and all looking at agentic commerce, and my thoughts have been I think this will be a while out. And I don't really know why I thought that, but I've been deep into co-work lately with Claude, having it do all of these tasks and all these skills. And I'm sitting here and I'm watching it, and I'm like, oh, oh yeah. Now agentic commerce makes sense from the user side because we have myself going through like, hey, do this thing for me. Like I think it's coming. How soon do you think? Like you said, you just said Black Friday, but do you think it's gonna be user adoption quicker than that?

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Um, you know, we had talked about this in the earlier segment. I'll I'll I'll say it here again. I I think the the demand is already there. Everybody wants it, everybody will use it. The technology just isn't there. So OpenAI tried to launch this, you know, say I'm gonna miss the timing, but say six months ago, right? Like they had made a big announcement and just kind of didn't do anything, right? We talked to all the brands, everybody was hyped, everybody wanted it. It just it just wasn't there, and it's it's because it's complicated. So uh all those feeds, products, is it in stock, out of stock, pricing. Pricing sometimes changes by the by the minute on some of these marketplaces. Like it's it's a hallucination. You think it hallucinates now, right? It's a it's a nightmare of logistics, even just little things like OpenA struggled with like state tax, right? Like just stuff that it wasn't thinking about that it had to get. Here's the thing they're gonna solve it. The the it's like the consumer demands that they solve it, they will solve it. Um, I still think we're a little further out. Um, like I said, I I most so I won't give away anybody's numbers, but nobody has I've talked to, and I'm talking to some of the biggest companies in the world, no one has ever told me that the the revenue they get from AI is over five percent. No one. It's usually less than one percent, right? And so we're there, but the demand is just like massive, it's just waiting, like like I said earlier, a flood is coming. And so what you don't want to do is do nothing and then get hit by the tsunami, right? Right, um, but at the same time, it might be one to five percent of your revenue this Black Friday. You you can't go all in and then ignore the 95, right? And so you're you're unfortunately in a little bit of why why I joked when you said that you should be straddling the fence. That is the proper position to be. Um, anybody who's in one camp, I do nothing, or I'm all in, we only care about agenda commerce, is wrong. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

So I think about it in terms of of the user themselves. I've been saying for months, I don't think that chat GPT or AI search is gonna be a thing for the older generation. I'm thinking about my dad who watching him use an iPhone as an experience. I mean, the man can't put a contact in into his phone, but he tells me he really loves the AI overviews. So I think like the demand absolutely is there, it's just yeah, the technology is not, which is interesting. Yeah, um, but there's this stat floating around that AI agents could mediate three to five trillion dollars in consumer commerce by 2030. If even half of that is right, what's a good floor to have, right? Yeah, yeah, great, yeah, exactly. What does the brand's organization chart need to look at to serve both humans and these agents as customers?

SPEAKER_00 11:36

So you you've stumbled into my my favorite topic, which is it's it's the mindset that your organization has to adopt. AI, if you're if you're an e-commerce retailer, AI is not a technology you serve, it's a customer you serve. And while that sounds like simple, what like it's everything. It's a customer, not a technology. And so I I I would go as far as doing persona research on AI. I would literally I'd have my, you know, he was like, here is, you know, Sassy Sarah, and she does right, right? And you have all the all the little workups, like where's your chat GPT one? Where's your claude? Where's Claude, right? Where does Claude I don't want to answer more? Yeah, is it Claude a he or is she? I don't know. But where does Claude get its facts? What format does Claude like to receive the information in? What accessibility issues does Claude have that it can't access access what types of JavaScript, right? How does Claude, when presented with five things that could be true, reason over the truth? These are things that we've been doing for a hundred years for people, right? But we're not doing it for AI. So the my point is if AI is summarizing your website for her, and then doing the research and the clicking so she doesn't have to, so that she buys the pair of sneakers, isn't then AI acting as either a bridge or a barrier between you or her? Isn't it then your customer? And that's that's where to me I see sometimes either a light go on or off, or people are like, that's BS, or like the light goes on, and they're like, wait a minute, I I actually have been just thinking about it like tech, and I'm going, no, it's the customer, it's your make or break customer, it's your ultimate customer, because it's the decider. If it deems you unworthy, you never show up in her summary. You're never one of the options that she should pursue. And right now you can get away with it. But once it gets so personalized and she trusts it more than she trusts you, you cannot be out of the equation because she'll trust that it's right and you're wrong. So that per as personalization, rightly or wrongly, gets better, people will get addicted, rightly or wrongly, to that personalization of AI that knows them so so well. And once they do that, you'll see the trust capital switch from the retailer to the AI, the my AI that I believe in trust. And so it becomes absolutely your customer and it deems you worthy or unworthy each time. So you gotta think about it that way. I know I got way up on the soapbox there, but that that's I I'm passionate about that because I believe it, I just believe it to be true. And it just once you think about it, it sort of becomes obvious, but I I don't see a lot of people adopting that mindset.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

So I like to think about these AI engines as a trusted grandma. Like they're not gonna, yeah, they're not gonna give you a recommendation of something that they know you're not gonna like. Like your grandma is not gonna do your dirt. But when you think about it in terms of being a buyer, that makes a lot of sense that you have to think about them. Okay, now they're an actual customer. They're not just a recommendation layer that are also doing the buying.

SPEAKER_00 15:13

Exactly. They're doing the buying. Um, and so yeah, especially, yeah, when they connect that last mile and they're not just recommending, but they're actually hitting add-to-cart checkout shipping, um, then yeah, how how is that not your customer? I mean, it's absolutely your customer. And so, yeah, thinking about it that way, and you know, that changes the things. Maybe you should be serving the way you organize your reviews for AI because it if you're doing the research and seeing how it uh how it parses different review sets, maybe you're surfacing different ones to that just like you would for a customer. It's like, what is our call to action that she's resonating with? Aren't you testing CTAs all the time? Of course you are. Are you testing anything right now for AI agents? The answer is usually no. You should be, right? Because they're your they're your new customer type, and eventually I believe they'll be the dominant customer type for for everyone.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

And they're they're all different too. I think that's important to keep in mind. Like chat GPT acts a little bit differently than than Gemini, and the overviews also act differently than Gemini. Like that part drives me nuts. Um, yes. Do we also need to think about this though, in terms of okay, we have the AI agent, so chat GPT, cloud, or whatever. Do we have to think about their persona in terms of okay? Well, here's our audience personas, and they're using these agents. So now we have to think about how that affects those personas, or are we just here's how chat GPT works, here's how cloud works. Does that question make sense?

SPEAKER_00 16:44

Yeah, I think so. I I I it it's like old days of SEO, like we had um Yahoo, we had Google, and you sort of like optimize different being like different ways, you know, like each had its own preferences and rules. So I would say this: look, that, you know, we talked to earlier about you know 10 problems, and that's the 11th, like that might be the 12th. Because I would love for a brand to be so locked in that they're optimizing for perplexity and clawed and like making tweaks, but the reality is they just don't have enough time in the day. And so I would at least start with just what would AI in general look like as a customer? Where am I getting most of my traffic? Uh pull up, have IT, pull up your logs, look where you're getting it. I can already tell plot twist, I can already tell you it's mostly uh gonna be from Gemini and Chat GPT. So chat GPT is gonna take me like 60-70%, then you're gonna get um Gemini traffic from AI overviews and and Gemini itself, and then a small, small but important set, depending on who you are, from from uh knowledge workers using co-work, like you were saying you're using. Um, so that's what you're gonna see. And so, yeah, just uh optimize for agentic uh commerce, um accessibility, um answering with intent. So, like right now, let's say you're selling strollers. I use this as an example a lot. Uh your attributes that you may be telling the agent or customers like, hey, this is a stroller, it comes in black, uh, has two cup holders, the wheels are you know, 14 inches or whatever it is, right? Like it might be pretty big wheels, I think. I don't know. I don't know if stroller wheels, but the the the point is it's very like attribute focused. Well, what about intent focused? Can the stroller fold up easily on a subway? You know, can this can I take it on a flight? Can it go over gravel at the park? That's intent-based. And agents think on behalf of their user. They know that she just had, you know, a toddler and they know that they go to the park, and they know it know it knows, right? And so um thinking about I wouldn't necessarily be like, okay, I'm gonna write it this way for Claude, and then I'm gonna write it this way for perplex, but even just thinking what we just talked about, just going, how could I take all of my stroller content and make it much more intent-based so that AI that reasons can reason over these intents? Any brand that does that will be light years ahead of most who are still in this like cookie-cutter attribute world, get to an intent world.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

You have to be very specific with your use cases and everything that it covers, I think, when it comes to this, which kind of blends into how we do content strategy now. Like, are we creating the content that speaks directly to this thing? Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Yes, yeah, don't yeah, specificity. Specificity is is huge. Um, you know, um, instead of just saying, like, here's some kitchen tips for you know 2025 or 2026, um, you're like, this is why I chose this specific countertop, uh, because I have kids that you know spill on it. You know, it's it it go specific. Um and and if you're if your product is good for people with this type of, you know, hey, it's good for people with bad knees, like that's what you talk about. Um, that's what's gonna make you unique. And you know, that's what's you're not optimizing for search bots, you're optimizing for bots that can reason. And that's why you have to think of them like a customer. They're reasoning on behalf of the customer.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

So that goes back to you have to be visible. Being visible means you have to be specific and talk about your use cases all the time, right? And then you have to be ready for the agentic layer. Is there anything like a final tip of a brand or anyone thinking, okay, well, how do I be ready for the agentic layer? Anything that they should be doing now before this really becomes mainstream?

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Yeah, so I would I would just set it in two parts. Like if you are a smaller brand and you're on, I'm just gonna use being generic. Like your smaller brand, you're on Shopify. Like, let Shopify handle the like super like agentic commerce protocol layer, right? Like they're they're trust me, they're on it, right? But what you can do is all the visibility side, the intent, changing the way you communicate. You also can do the things that we talked about, you know, like uh uh checking accessibility. Can the agent, you know, show up and see my Shopify content? You all that's on you, right? Um, you can check that easily. Is is everything hidden behind JavaScript carousels and it goes away when when AI shows up? That's on you. You should fix that. Um, what's on Shopify is the back-end back end, like can it literally add to cart? Can it check out and understand taxes and all that? You shouldn't worry about that. Now, if you're a big box retailer, you absolutely should be worrying about that. If you're not having conversations right now about Google's universal commerce protocol, UCP, you're not having the right conversations. You must Be having those types of conversations if you're a bigger box retailer, if you're a larger company. Smaller companies, like I said, control what you can control. Don't try to boil the ocean. Let Shopify do the last mile. You do all the intent, visibility, accessibility, and you'll be in a good spot for the future.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Okay, that is part two with AJ, and I want to leave you with the one shift that will actually matter in the next six-six months. We need to stop thinking about AI as a technology that you serve. Start thinking about as a customer that you serve. That's AJ's framing, and I really think it's the right one. The AI agents that are doing research on behalf of your buyer isn't a bot to game, it's a decision maker. It's reasoning over your content, comparing you against your competitors, and deciding whether you're worth recommending exactly the way a trusted friend would. So here's the practical question to take into this week when you start thinking about all of this. Question is, is your content written for how a customer thinks or how a search bot indexes? Because those are two very different things. We're talking attributes versus intent. For example, a search of 14-inch wheels versus can the stroller handle the subway and the park are two very different things. Agents are reasoning, they're looking for the second answer, not so much the first one. If you're a smaller brand on Shopify, AJ was pretty clear about this. Let Shopify handle the back-end commerce protocol layer. They are already on top of it, I promise you. They are on top of it. What's on you though is invisibility, intent, and accessibility. So go ahead and check whether your key content disappears when JavaScript is off. Rewrite your product and service pages around what your customer is actually trying to do, not just what you're offering. If you're a larger brand and you're not having conversations right now about Google's Universal Commerce Protocol that was announced last week. Actually, it was announced a while ago, but had a real big focus last week at I.O. You need to be. I know I sound like Noah from the Bible. If you know, you know that the flood is coming. It is not here at full force yet, but the demand is built up. The technology is catching up, and the brands that are visible, specific, and intent focused when it arrives are the ones that are going to win. They're gonna be set and pretty. Part three, which again is part two with AJ, is coming next week, and we're getting to AI governance, which I know sounds a little dry, but I promise you it's not. This is a piece that determines whether any of this actually holds up long term. Episode links and resources are in the show notes. Until then, stay visible.