Last holiday season, agents influenced 20% of all purchases[1]. We're not talking about a new app consumers need to download. We're talking about ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, apps that hundreds of millions of people already use. But in nearly every case, a human still had to click the buy button. Now, industry leaders are racing to change that.
Finding You
The new customer journey starts with brand discovery. None of the rest matters if agents don't know you exist. Some of this is familiar territory. Clean site structure, fast load times, and clear content still matter, just as they did for Google SEO. But a lot is different. Each agent has its own crawler, its own indexing methods, and its own quirks. Each is built by a different company with a different approach to understanding your business. What works for one may not work for another. Try our free site scanner to see how your brand stacks up.
Seeing Your Catalog
Once an agent finds you, it needs to understand what you offer. Over a million Shopify merchants are being onboarded for ChatGPT's Instant Checkout[2]. If Shopify makes its merchants agent-ready by default, that's how the majority of small and mid-size businesses will start.
If you're a law firm, bank, or government agency, agents can find you through search today, but they can't interact with you: they can't check your availability, understand your services, or complete a transaction. MCP (the Model Context Protocol) is emerging as the standard way to solve this, letting you stand up a dedicated endpoint agents can talk to directly. Think of it as giving agents a front door to your business. We expect every company to need one.
Making Purchases
Payment processors are retooling checkout for agents. Stripe co-developed a new standard with OpenAI[3], then launched a product that lets merchants connect their catalog through a single integration[4]. PayPal and Fiserv are moving too[5] [6], and no matter which processor you use, they're working on this.
Card networks are building the trust layer, the systems that verify an agent is authorized to spend on a consumer's behalf. Visa launched Intelligent Commerce[7]. Mastercard announced Agent Pay[8], with built-in fraud prevention and dispute support[9]. American Express is contributing to the development of open payment standards alongside both.
Your New Sales Funnel
The full funnel is being reimagined. Discovery is shifting from search engines to agent apps, where visibility depends on an entirely new set of rules. Commerce platforms are structuring product and service data so agents can understand what you sell, compare it, and match it to a consumer's intent. And payment processors and card networks are building rails that let agents complete transactions without a human clicking through checkout.
Every layer is being rebuilt for a customer that isn't human. We estimate that up to 50% of purchases will be influenced by agents this year[10]. The companies that move now will be the ones agents recommend. The rest will wonder where their traffic went.
