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Agentic commerce is what happens when an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, or a brand’s own copilot — can recommend and complete a purchase on behalf of a user. For your store to participate, four things need to be true: AI can find your products, you speak the right commerce protocol, AI can trigger a checkout, and you can see and measure what AI drove. Asva AI covers all four.

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The agentic commerce stack

  1. Discovery — The AI can find your products via catalog feeds, AEO/GEO, and .well-known/ucp
  2. Protocol compliance — You speak the right commerce language (UCP or ACP)
  3. Checkout — The AI can trigger a payment on your behalf
  4. Attribution — You can see and measure what AI drove

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Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

UCP is an open standard backed by Google that lets AI assistants discover, evaluate, and purchase from any merchant using a shared commerce language. When you implement UCP, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and any UCP-compatible agent can browse your catalog and complete purchases without the user leaving the AI experience. How it works:
Where UCP surfaces:
  • Google AI Mode (Shopping)
  • Google Gemini
  • Any UCP-compatible AI agent
Key files you need to host:
  • /.well-known/ucp — capability manifest (required; publicly accessible, no auth)
  • Product catalog endpoint — your structured product feed
  • Checkout endpoint — creates and completes orders
UCP builds on Google Merchant Center. If you already have a Merchant Center feed, you’re halfway there. See the Google Merchant Center guide.

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Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

ACP is OpenAI’s protocol for enabling ChatGPT and other OpenAI-powered agents to initiate and complete purchases via tool calls — without the user leaving the conversation. How it works:
Where ACP surfaces:
  • ChatGPT (Instant Checkout)
  • Any OpenAI-powered agent with function calling
Key concepts:
  • Tool definitions — JSON schemas that describe your commerce tools to the agent
  • Checkout state machine — create → update → complete flow
  • Idempotency — safe retries with idempotency keys to prevent duplicate orders
ACP and UCP are complementary. Many brands implement both for maximum coverage across Google and OpenAI surfaces. See UCP vs ACP for guidance on which to prioritize.

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Dark agentic traffic

When a user finds your product on ChatGPT or Gemini and then visits your site directly, that session typically arrives with no referrer — and lands in GA4 as “Direct” or “(not set)”. This is dark agentic traffic: real, high-intent visits that your analytics can’t see. Why this happens:
  • AI assistants use server-side requests that strip the browser referrer
  • Referrer headers are removed by ChatGPT’s click proxy
  • UTM parameters are rarely appended by AI surfaces
  • GA4’s default channel grouping has no “AI” category
What Asva does: Asva’s attribution snippet analyzes session fingerprints, timing patterns, and UTM signals to identify AI-sourced sessions and surface them as a distinct channel in your analytics.
See Dark traffic attribution for implementation details.

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Readiness Score

The Readiness Score is Asva’s 100-point audit of your site’s agentic commerce readiness. Run it against any domain via the Readiness API or the free browser tool. What gets checked: Score grades:

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AEO and GEO

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are the practices of making your brand and products easy for AI systems to find, cite, and transact with. For commerce, that means:
  • Structured product data (JSON-LD Product and Offer schema)
  • Entity consistency — the same brand name, legal entity, and address everywhere
  • UCP/ACP protocol compliance so agents can complete purchases
  • Evidence blocks with official sources so AI cites you, not competitors
See the full AEO/GEO guide for implementation tactics.

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Glossary

Full definitions at asva-ai.com/glossary.