A year ago, asking ChatGPT to buy you something was a joke. By late 2025, it was a real feature. OpenAI and Stripe quietly rolled out a way to complete an actual purchase inside a chat window, and within months Visa, Mastercard, and Google had each built their own version of the same idea.
How This Actually Started
On September 29, 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard co-developed with Stripe. More than a million Shopify merchants followed shortly after, including Glossier, Vuori, and SKIMS. Google built a competing standard called AP2 with Shopify. Four competing protocols now exist for roughly the same idea, and none has become the obvious default yet.
What the Traffic Data Actually Shows
This is the part with real footing, from Adobe Analytics tracking over a trillion visits to US retail sites. During the 2025 holiday season, AI-referred traffic grew 693% year-over-year, converting 31% more often than other traffic. By Q1 2026, AI traffic was still up 393%, converting 42% better than standard traffic. One year earlier, that same traffic had converted 38% worse. That flip happened in about twelve months.
Where the Hype Outruns the Evidence
Salesforce's widely cited claim that AI agents "drove" 20% of global holiday orders measures AI-influenced purchases, not purchases an agent actually completed. A separate, much narrower academic analysis found ChatGPT referrals specifically accounted for under 0.2% of e-commerce sessions. No major retailer has publicly disclosed more than 5% of sales coming through agent-completed checkout, as of now.
It's Already Running Into Legal Friction
A district court granted Amazon an injunction against Perplexity's Comet shopping agent in March 2026, but the Ninth Circuit later vacated it, finding Amazon's own users, not Perplexity, were accessing their accounts. The case continues in district court, genuinely unresolved either direction.
For the full breakdown, including the protocol landscape and what this means for a US business or blogger, the longer piece is here: https://nextgentech-official.blogspot.com/2026/10/what-is-agentic-commerce-2026.html
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