Notes from the agent layer
Research on advertising inside AI assistants, first-party measurement of AI-driven traffic, and founder POV pieces from building Serge.
How AI shopping agents actually see your website
When Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity browses your store on a shopper's behalf, it doesn't see what you see. It reads the accessibility tree, structured data, screenshots, and the URL. Here's the mental model — with the parts that actually trip agents up on real e-commerce sites.
Simple steps to make your online store AI-ready
Ordered by what we've actually seen break on real e-commerce sites — not by what looks important on paper. Five specific fixes your engineering team can ship without re-architecting anything: real button elements, accessible variant selectors, schema.org Product data, agent-friendly robots.txt, and bot-protection that doesn't 403 well-behaved agents.
Will AI agents hurt my e-commerce sales? Here's what we found
The honest answer is more interesting than the breathless one. AI agent impact on e-commerce is asymmetric — replenishment categories lose silently, considered-purchase categories are barely affected, and structurally agent-ready sites gain share. Here's the shape of it.
Why GA4 is blind to Claude shoppers
GA4 can't see Claude or ChatGPT shoppers because the agent navigates without referrer headers. Here's the mechanism — and what we built instead.