Meanwhile, as you were optimizing
...the whole customer journey collapsed into a single API call.
While you were removing every moment of pause in the customer journey — the browsing, the considering, the comparing, the slow build of wanting that makes someone choose you — that journey was being compressed into a single API call.
The Rise of the Machines
In September 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout. A way for consumers to buy directly inside ChatGPT, powered by Stripe and will be integrated with over a million Shopify stores.1 In January 2026, Google announced Universal Commerce Protocol at the National Retail Federation conference. It created an open standard for agent-based purchasing, backed by Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart, and my former employer Visa.2
And then there’s Amazon, the godfather of platform disintermediation. Its “Buy for Me” has been live since April 2025. It lets an AI agent purchase from third-party sites without the customer ever leaving Amazon. Tens of thousands of items were available by the end of the year, including some from brands that never agreed to participate.3 The big walled garden just expanded its acreage and absolutely no one should be surprised. And, it will continue.
eBay’s updated user agreement goes live tomorrow, explicitly banning “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that places orders without human review.”4 It’s enacting a policy against something that barely existed twelve months ago and taking a pretty unique stance.
Disintermediation is not a 2030 conversation
Salesforce and Adobe independently converged on the same finding: around 39% consumers are already using AI to shop.6,7 Not “curious about,” not “open to trying;” already doing it.
Brand teams are paying attention. Most are quickly trying to make content more parseable by AI. Structuring product data for agents, not humans. Trying to win what I’d call Top of Algorithm: being the brand the AI recommends.
And it’s not like they’re wrong, precisely. Brands cited in Google’s AI Overviews see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than those that aren’t.8 AI-referred traffic spends 45% more time on site.9 The traffic is smaller but richer. This is a great result for marketers.
Algorithmic Legibility works. Ish. And, while your board asks the same question at every meeting: exactly how fast you can win this new game? The question rolling around in my head is: what are brands actually winning and how much of this “optimization” can they survive?
You ask an agent to buy moisturizer. It evaluates a thousand options against your criteria — price, reviews, ingredients, delivery speed — and purchases one. You never saw the packaging. Didn’t see the brand story. There was no comparison against the one you used to love or the brand your friend raves about (Rhode, of course). The agent matched criteria and completed the transaction. You didn’t choose that brand, you received it.
Yes, brands that customers specify by name will still win. But how many of your customers, let alone prospects, will name you?
An agent that purchases you is not a customer who chose you. Algorithmic Legibility and Agentic Invisibility are two sides of the same coin. You can be perfectly readable to the machine and become completely invisible to the human. The agent matched criteria. The customer received a product. Nobody chose anything.
Google Gemini is out-Googling itself. The industry’s only response is to optimize harder for the thing that’s replacing a bunch of important customer touch points the brand used to own.
Right Now, It’s No Better Than A Coin Toss
So, folks who are jumping on the Legibility bandwagon, aren’t wrong; but they’re also not in charge.
SparkToro found less than a 1% chance the same brands appear across two AI responses to the same query.10 Your brand isn’t being rejected. It’s flickering, present in one answer, absent the next with zero transparency either way for the brand or consumer.
If you ask me, big problem actually isn’t inconsistency (though that is a bit of a whopper). Or even our own lack of understanding about how the tech works. We’ve been at the mercy of the black boxes for a while now. The difference is that with traditional performance marketing, you appeared in the results and the customer still made a choice. With agents, the cognitive labour of evaluation — the comparing, the weighing, the deciding — shifts off-screen entirely. The customer never sees the analysis. The agent evaluates, the agent buys, and your brand was either there or not. This is evaluation compression, and it’s a fundamentally different kind of invisibility than anything we’ve dealt with before.
On this side of the equation, the news is not so nice. Organic click-through rates have dropped 61% on queries where AI overviews appear. Paid clicks are down 68%.8
Replicating the Performance Marketing Ponzi Scheme with Higher Stakes
The industry is solving a commercial problem: how do I stay visible to AI agents? And few are talking about the extent of our burgeoning brand problem: what happens to meaning, attachment, and discovery when the customer is removed from the process entirely?
The commercial problem centers on Algorithmic Legibility which is about data structure, readability, being in the agent’s consideration set. Necessary, but insufficient. An AI agent doesn’t think of anything. It evaluates. It compares. It optimizes. Mental availability, that prize of being the brand you think of first, is irrelevant to a machine that has no mind.
Take for example, CPG brands. They’ve never owned the customer relationship; retailers have always held the data. They survived on mental availability, of being the brand you reach for without thinking. An agent has no mind to be “top of.” Fashion is arguably worse: the entire value proposition is built on discovery, desire, identity. The BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 indicates whoever controls the AI agent and its training data controls how the brand is perceived — when a bot, not a person, is doing the buying.12 A luxury handbag reduced to a line item in a chatbot response has literally lost almost everything that made it a luxury handbag.
And even if you win the visibility game and your product data is perfectly structured, your reviews are plentiful, your content is beautifully optimized — you’ve won the right to be purchased. Not chosen. Purchased. The customer never browsed, never compared, never felt anything. That’s not brand loyalty. That’s procurement. And nobody has ever fallen in love with sourcing.
CFOs Should Be Losing Sleep
This is not just a brand problem. It’s a margin problem. A brand that is not chosen has no pricing power. No differentiation that survives a filter. In the agent’s eyes, a commodity. And commodities compete on price until someone loses.
Algorithmic Legibility or Agentic Invisibility. Two problems, not one. The industry is only working on the easier one.
The harder one, how you preserve what makes your brand mean something when discovery itself is being automated, is the one that will actually determine who survives this.
Every quarter you don’t address it, you’re paying a Discovery Tax: the compounding cost of ceding how customers find you, experience you, and decide you’re worth choosing again.
That tax has components. Reduced premium tolerance as customers lose attachment to brands they never chose. Substitution volatility as agents swap you out on marginal differences in rating or price. Rising retention costs to replace the relationship building that used to come from discovery. Growing dependence on agent-facing optimization you don’t control means your also at the mercy of a whole new set of platforms.
The math on this is not abstract. It’s in your P&L.
What’s your brand’s Discovery Tax? That’s not a rhetorical question. And it’s the one your board should be asking this quarter.
Footnotes
OpenAI, “Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol”, 29 September 2025.
Google, “Agentic Commerce: New AI Tools and Protocol for Retailers”, 11 January 2026. Announced at NRF 2026.
Modern Retail, “Brands are upset that ‘Buy For Me’ is featuring their products on Amazon without permission”, January 2026. See also CNBC.
EcommerceBytes, “eBay Bans AI Shopping Agents, Updates Arbitration Provision”, 21 January 2026. Effective 20 February 2026.
BCG, “Consumers Are Rewriting the Rules of Year-End Sales Events”, November 2025. 48% of consumers used or planned to use GenAI during year-end sales.
Salesforce, “With AI Adoption Surging, Shopping Behavior Is at an Inflection Point”, 2025. 39% of consumers using AI for product discovery; over 50% of Gen Z.
Adobe, “Generative AI-Powered Shopping Rises with Traffic to U.S. Retail Sites”, 2025.
Seer Interactive, “AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update”, September 2025. Analysis of 3,119 queries across 42 organisations, June 2024–September 2025.
Adobe, “AI-Driven Traffic Surges Across Industries”, 2025.
SparkToro, “NEW Research: AIs are Highly Inconsistent When Recommending Brands or Products”, December 2025.
PwC, “CPG Industry Self-Disruption”, 2025. Survey conducted April–May 2025.
Business of Fashion & McKinsey, “The State of Fashion 2026”, 2026.