The Conversation

What's being said about AI shopping. And what we say back.

This is the conversation we're having every day, in public. On the left is what someone else published. On the right is our reply. We only put a source here if we read it.

first-party announcement

Amazon's Buy for Me buys from other brands' sites

Amazon · April 3, 2025

“The customer is in control of the AI agent acting on their behalf, and brands have the choice if they want to participate and benefit from the increased brand visibility, customer engagement, and sales.”

Amazon put an agent inside its shopping app that completes a purchase on a brand's own website when Amazon doesn't sell the item. The brand still handles delivery, returns and customer service.

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Our reply

Visibility, engagement and sales is what a brand is offered for letting an agent through. What it isn't offered is a say in how the agent describes it. The moment a machine reads your site and then speaks for you, your product data becomes your sales voice. We check whether that voice says what you actually mean.

commentary

Launching Buy For Me on the Amazon Shopping App

Daniel Lopez-Martinez, Amazon · April 3, 2025

“The system autonomously navigates real webpages, extracts product information, makes decisions, and completes purchases on behalf of the customer.”

One of the engineers who built Amazon's agent describes what it actually does: it opens a brand's real website and uses it the way a person would.

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Our reply

This is the sentence we point brands at. The agent doesn't ask for a feed or wait for an API. It opens your page and reads it. So the question is no longer whether an agent will find you — it's whether your page can be read by something with no patience, no eyes, and no way to ask a question.

first-party announcement

Announcing Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)

Google Cloud · September 16, 2025

“Accountability: Determining accountability if a fraudulent or incorrect transaction occurs.”

Google published an open protocol for agent-led payments with more than 60 organisations behind it, naming the three questions a checkout has to answer when nobody is clicking: who authorised it, whether it reflects what the person actually wanted, and who answers for it if it's wrong.

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Our reply

A payment protocol settles who is accountable when an agent buys the wrong thing. It can't settle whether the brand told the truth about the thing it sold. That gap is ours. We publish our own verifiable record for the same reason the protocol exists — so a claim can be checked by a machine instead of taken on trust.

first-party announcement

Developing an open standard for agentic commerce

Stripe · September 29, 2025

“businesses should be able to sell through new channels without giving up trust, brand, or control”

Stripe and OpenAI opened up the checkout behind Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, so a store can be bought from by an agent without handing over its brand or its control of the sale.

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Our reply

A protocol gives an agent a way to buy from you. It doesn't give it a reason to. Trust is the part no protocol can hand over, because trust is a claim about your business, not a field in a schema — and that claim has to be readable and checkable where the agent is already standing: your site.

research

42% of Consumers Now Use AI Tools to Shop

NielsenIQ (NIQ) · May 5, 2026

“AI is not replacing the consumer, but it is dramatically reshaping how choices are made.”

NIQ's survey data puts 42% of consumers using an AI tool to shop within the past month, while only 5% have let an agent place an order on its own. AI is shaping the decision long before anyone hands over the buying.

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Our reply

The number we care about is the gap between 42 and 5. Almost half of shoppers now arrive through an AI, but almost nobody has handed it the purchase. So the agent's job today is the shortlist — and being left off the shortlist is the failure mode. That is what the seal is for: being recommendable before anyone is ready to be bought from.

How this page is kept

Every entry links to the original. We keep the date it was published, so you can see how fast this is moving. If we haven't read something, we don't list it.

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