AI traffic surges with new tool launch
As AI takes center stage, a deeper shift is unfolding beneath the hype, with shoppers increasingly finding products through AI assistants and agents, resulting in a 1,300% jump in traffic from these agents to retail sites over the past year.
Morgan Stanley projects that autonomous agents could influence up to $385 billion in U.S. ecommerce spend by 2030.
The impact is already visible on individual marketplaces, such as Amazon’s AI shopping assistant Rufus, which drove 40% of sessions and influenced 66% of purchases during last year’s Black Friday, delivering a 3.5x conversion lift.
Product visibility has changed.
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Niels Floors, VP of Strategic Development at ChannelEngine, notes that the systems powering search results, marketplace rankings, and AI-generated recommendations all rely on product data to decide what appears in front of shoppers.
According to Niels Floors, “We’re seeing a fundamental shift in what product visibility means. The issue now is how an AI agent understands products.”
He adds, “They don’t browse product pages; they evaluate structured data and decide what to recommend. Missing or inconsistent attributes don’t just hurt rankings. They take products out of the running entirely.”
In April, ChannelEngine will launch AI Attribute Builder, a new capability that helps brands generate, enrich, and standardize product attributes to meet the specific requirements of each channel they sell on.
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This covers everything from complete specifications and descriptions to product identifiers that AI agents can read, assess, and recommend, with protocols like Google and Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol and OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol already defining how AI agents access and interpret product information.
Jorrit Steinz, CEO and Founder of ChannelEngine, says, “Clean, complete, consistent data has always mattered for marketplace success. What’s changing is who’s reading it. Today it’s marketplace algorithms. Tomorrow it’s AI agents influencing purchasing decisions.”
ChannelEngine helps brands manage product data, pricing, inventory, and orders across hundreds of channels from one place, extending this with product data enrichment to meet the growing demands of both marketplaces and AI-powered commerce.
AI agents are playing an increasingly important role in ecommerce.
