A customer will set an intent and a budget, and an AI agent will do the comparing, the qualifying and increasingly the buying. Agents don't browse — they read structure. AgentRex makes your business legible, comparable and transactable to them. It also tells you, honestly, if you don't need this yet.
This is not a prediction. Three checkout protocols shipped inside twelve months and the infrastructure is live now — which is precisely why the honest question is whether it touches your business yet.
Google and Shopify launched UCP at NRF as an open standard letting agents interact with merchant catalogues, carts and checkout through one interface.
OpenAI's protocol, built with Stripe, is in production with partners including Instacart, DoorDash, Shopify and Etsy. Discovery and checkout are becoming protocol-driven.
Shopify merchants now sell inside ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Mode and Gemini simultaneously, with over a million auto-enrolled. The question is no longer whether you participate — it is whether your data is good enough to be chosen.
Checkout.com found the average spend consumers will let an agent commit without approval is about £177, and 75% of merchants say instant permission revocation will be critical. Useful as the default confirmation threshold when you design agent flows.
The consistent finding across every study: a merchant with a basic catalogue and a clean, structured feed gets recommended, while a sophisticated one with a poor feed gets skipped. Agents reward legibility, not budget. That is the whole opportunity for a smaller business.
Most consultancies would tell you the answer is always yes. It isn't, and selling you a protocol you have nothing to plug into would cost us both more than it earned me.
Four weeks, founder-delivered, ending with a documented readiness report you can hand to a platform, an insurer or a buyer.
Products, services, prices, variants and availability published as machine-readable data rather than as design. The cheapest pillar and the one with the highest qualifying impact.
Returns policy, delivery or appointment timescales, cut-offs, coverage area, eligibility. Agents qualify you against a customer's constraints before they ever consider your price.
Connecting what you already run — Shopify, your booking system, your feed — to the surfaces that matter, without betting the business on which standard wins.
Confirmation thresholds, spend caps, cancellation and revocation paths, and a written record of what an agent may and may not do on a customer's behalf. This is where trust is won or lost.
The AEO layer underneath all of it. A perfect feed is useless if the agent never shortlists you — citation and entity work is what puts you in the consideration set.
A scored, dated document covering all five pillars with evidence, plus a re-check at 90 days. Written to be shown to a platform, a franchisor or an acquirer — not just filed.
One-off, four weeks, no retainer attached. There is nothing recurring to maintain yet and I will not invent a subscription to a protocol.
If the score says you're not ready for this yet, I'll tell you to spend the money on visibility instead — and I'd rather you heard that from an automated tool than from a sales call.
Run the free check → Or book 15 minutes with ShanazIt is making your prices, availability, terms and permissions structured enough that an AI agent acting for a customer can evaluate you, qualify you against their constraints, and complete a transaction without a human reading your website.
None of them exclusively. Three open standards are competing and the sensible position for a smaller business is to get your underlying data clean and connect through the platform you already use, so you are not rebuilding when one wins.
For bespoke professional services, largely yes, and I say so above. For anyone with a catalogue it is already live — agentic storefronts are transacting inside ChatGPT today and over a million merchants are enrolled.
No — it depends on it. An agent can only transact with a business it shortlisted, and shortlisting is a citation problem. Agent readiness without visibility is a well-organised shop on a street nobody walks down.
Design for the trust ceiling. Consumers will currently let an agent commit around £177 unsupervised, and merchants overwhelmingly expect instant revocation to be essential — so set confirmation thresholds below that and make cancellation trivial.
Yes, and it's practical rather than dramatic: consent, permissions and cancellation rights are consumer-law territory, and if you run anything AI-facing for EU customers the EU AI Act's transparency duties apply from 2 August 2026. I flag it; your solicitor advises on it.