Glossary
The vocabulary of commerce in the AI era.
Plain-language definitions of the concepts behind AI shopping, brand agents, and the shift from browsing to asking.
Intent-Driven Commerce
An approach to e-commerce that organizes the shopping experience around what a buyer is actually trying to accomplish, rather than around the catalog's structure or the platform's keyword index.
Adaptive Product Page (Adaptive PDP)
A product detail page that automatically reshapes its layout, copy, and supporting content based on who is viewing it and what they appear to be trying to accomplish.
Conversational Commerce
Buying experiences that take place through a back-and-forth dialogue — typically text or voice — instead of through traditional point-and-click product browsing.
The Post-Click Problem
The gap between the sophisticated, AI-powered marketing that gets a shopper to click and the static, decade-old shopping experience they actually land on.
The Intent Gap
The difference between what a shopper types into a search box and what they actually mean — and the lost revenue that results when storefronts can't bridge the two.
Agent Storefront
A storefront surface built for AI agents rather than human browsers — structured product data, brand facts, and policies that a shopping agent can read, reason over, and buy from.
Agent Readability
How easily AI shopping agents can parse, trust, and act on a brand's catalog, content, and policies — the agent-era equivalent of crawlability.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
The practice of earning presence in AI-generated answers — being the brand that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini mention and cite when a shopper asks for a recommendation.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Structuring content so answer engines can extract, quote, and cite it directly — answer-first pages, FAQs, schema markup, and unambiguous entity definitions.
Agentic Commerce
Commerce in which AI agents — the shopper's or the brand's — mediate discovery, comparison, decision, and increasingly checkout.
Buyer Agent
An AI agent that shops on a consumer's behalf — discovering products, comparing options, and increasingly completing checkout — loyal to the shopper, not to any store.
Brand Agent
An AI agent that works for the brand: it sells to shoppers on the brand's own site, represents the brand accurately to outside buyer agents, and keeps what AI assistants read about the brand correct.
Merchant Agent
An AI agent operating on the merchant's side of commerce — selling to shoppers and their buyer agents, and in enterprise usage, automating merchant operations like merchandising and campaigns.
Seller Agent
The selling party in agent-to-agent commerce: an AI agent that represents a brand, merchant, or marketplace seller to shoppers and their buyer agents.
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)
An open standard — announced January 2026, led by Google with Shopify and other commerce partners — that lets AI agents discover a store's services, capabilities, and payment options from one JSON manifest at /.well-known/ucp.
Revenue Agents
AI agents that do revenue work for a brand — selling to shoppers, keeping the catalog complete and accurate, turning conversations into customer research — as distinct from the support bots that deflect tickets.
One Intelligence (One Brain)
The architecture in which a single model of a brand — its catalog, policies, customers, and conversations — powers every AI job the brand runs, so whatever one job learns makes all the others better.
Catalog Enrichment
The work of cleaning up and filling in a product catalog — fit, fabric, occasion, compatibility, pairings — so site search, sales agents, and the AI assistants where people now shop can sell from real attributes instead of guessing.
Dynamic Product Pages
Product pages that adapt to the shopper: the questions and answers on the page change with who's reading and what they're deciding, instead of every visitor getting the same static template.
Agent-Ready Storefront
A storefront that AI assistants can read and act on — both the ones browsing the store on a shopper's behalf and the ones pulling its data to answer questions elsewhere — so the brand is described by its own facts.
Answer Checks
Automated tests that grade an AI agent's answers against a store's real data — catalog, prices, stock, policies — so a brand knows the agent selling for it is telling the truth. The plain name for what AI engineers call evals.
Average Order Value (AOV)
The average dollar amount a customer spends per order: total revenue divided by number of orders over a period. One of the three levers of ecommerce revenue, alongside traffic and conversion rate.
See these ideas on a real storefront.
Book a demo and see what intent-driven commerce would look like on your store.