Shopping is changing. What used to begin with a search query on Google or a visit to a favorite retailer’s website now often starts with an AI agent, whether it’s a chat-based assistant, a recommendation engine, or an intelligent aggregator. As brands scramble to keep up with this shift, the question on every marketer’s mind is simple: Is your next best customer actually an AI bot?

From search to AI-first commerce

Last November, Scrunch AI CEO Chris Andrew joined Mike Linton on the CMO Confidential podcast for an episode titled “Is Your New Best Customer an AI Bot?” Back then, AI-driven shopping felt futuristic. Today, it’s foundational:

• Perplexity’s Merchant API & Ads Platform: In November of 2024, Perplexity opened a direct line for brands to influence how AI surfaces and monetizes commerce content. Rather than waiting for organic discovery, brands can now bid for placement in conversational threads and recommendation panels.
• PayPal Powers Agentic Commerce: On May 14, 2025, PayPal announced it is powering “agentic commerce” within Perplexity, letting shoppers transact seamlessly through AI conversations. Several Scrunch AI customers are already piloting these capabilities.
• ChatGPT’s Dedicated Shopping Experience: On April 28, 2025, OpenAI unveiled a standalone Shopping & Commerce interface for ChatGPT, with product-feed integrations on the horizon. Although integrations aren’t live yet, brands can join the waitlist today to ensure their catalogs are ready when the doors open.

These developments underscore a simple truth: AI isn’t just curating your products, it’s deciding which of them get seen. If you don’t optimize for AI agents, your offerings may never reach human eyes.

Why AI curation is the new front door

Most of us wouldn’t trust a bot to physically buy our next pair of shoes, but we already rely on AI to handle discovery, filtering, and comparison. From personalized recommendations on e-commerce giants to price-tracking extensions, bots are our unseen shopping companions. As that dynamic scales, brands must recognize that:

• AI agents are gatekeepers: Whether it’s OAI-SearchBot crawling product pages or ClaudeBot summarizing customer reviews, these bots are the new front door to your brand.
• Visibility means compatibility: If your site isn’t configured for easy crawling, or your metadata is buried in unstructured copy, AI agents will skip past your products.
• Curation precedes conversion: Before a human ever clicks “Add to Cart,” an AI bot has already judged if your offering is relevant—based on how well your data is formatted and presented.

Three steps to optimize for AI shopping

1. Monitor and allow AI crawlers

• Open the door: Ensure your robots.txt and sitemap grant access to key agents like OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended.
• Audit crawl logs regularly to confirm these bots aren’t hitting 404s or hitting rate limits.

2. Track AI-driven referrals

• Use UTM parameters: Append sources like utm_source=chatgpt.com or utm_source=perplexity.ai so you can segment and measure AI-originated traffic in your analytics dashboard.
• Analyze behavior: Compare AI referrals to traditional channels—are these visitors converting faster, viewing different pages, or engaging with unique content?

3. Structure content for retrieval

• Product feeds & rich snippets: Supply search-friendly fields—product name, description, price, availability, reviews—in machine-readable formats (JSON-LD, schema.org).
• Clear hierarchies: Break up long paragraphs into bullet points, tables, and headings. If a human needs to scroll to find a spec, a bot will too.

Looking ahead: Partners in AI commerce

As native commerce layers roll out across AI platforms, early movers will reap outsized visibility. At Scrunch AI, we’re helping brands adapt their SEO and content strategies for this new era, so that when a bot asks, “What should I show my shopper next?” your products top the list.

The era of AI-led shopping is here. Your best customer might still be a person, but their journey increasingly begins with a bot. Are you ready to open your front door?