03/09/2026
AI is increasingly taking on parts of the shopping journey: understanding intent, researching options, comparing products and making recommendations. AI-driven traffic to retail sites grew 693% year-on-year during the 2025 holiday season, according to Adobe.
And the industry is now building the infrastructure to take this further, with initiatives like Google's Universal Commerce Protocol designed to connect AI agents with merchants across discovery, purchase and post-purchase experiences.
But the implication here is that if an agent is going to make a decision on behalf of a shopper, it needs to understand the retailer first. It needs accurate attributes, availability, use cases, policies, product relationships, brand context and more.
Which raises an interesting question for retailers:
As more commerce gets mediated by AI, what does it mean for a product to be truly "discoverable"?
It may no longer be enough for a product to rank well, look good or have a strong conversion rate on a website.
It also needs to be understood well enough to be considered by a machine.
That's a shift we're thinking about a lot at Yarnit as we work on the next generation of commerce infrastructure.
