Shopping agents are starting to read product catalogues — what does a small shop actually need to expose?

It is a real shift and it is early, which is exactly the position where it is cheap to prepare and expensive to be told you should have.

What is changing: people increasingly ask an assistant to find and compare products rather than browsing results themselves. Whatever the assistant can read determines whether you are in the comparison. If it can read your competitor's catalogue and not yours, you are not losing a ranking position, you are absent.

What you should do is mostly things you already know how to do, which is the good news:

Structured data on product pages. Proper product markup with name, description, price, currency, availability, condition, identifiers and review data. This is long-standing, well-documented, and it is what a machine reads when it lands on your page.

A clean product feed. You have one for advertising. The same discipline — accurate availability, real identifiers, sensible categories — is what makes a catalogue machine-readable anywhere.

Let the crawlers in. Check your robots rules and your bot protection. A shop that blocks unknown agents is invisible to them by configuration.

On the newer protocol layer, and this is where I would be measured rather than enthusiastic.

There are emerging specifications for exposing a catalogue to agents directly, and for letting an agent complete a purchase, rather than having it scrape a page. Several large platforms and several standards efforts are moving in this area at once, and they do not yet agree.

My read: the structured data and the feed are safe investments — they are useful today for ordinary search, for advertising and for any agent that reads pages, and they will not be wasted whatever wins.

The protocol-specific integrations are a bet. If your platform ships support as a setting, turn it on; it costs nothing. Paying for a bespoke integration with one specification this early is a bet on which one survives, and I would want to see my own traffic justify it first.

Worth adding the measurement question, because otherwise you are working blind on this.

You can already see some of it. Assistant and agent traffic arrives with recognisable user agents and, increasingly, from identifiable address ranges. Segment your logs by that and you will have a number for how much of this is reaching you today.

For most small shops that number is currently small. It is also the number that tells you when to care, and watching it costs an hour of log work rather than a subscription.

Also worth checking whether referrals from assistant products appear in your analytics at all — attribution here is genuinely poor, and a share of what looks like direct traffic is somebody acting on an assistant's recommendation.

One caution on the category as a whole: be careful with anything promising to optimise your listings for agents in ways that differ from what you show people.

Serving different content to a machine than to a human visitor is the old cloaking problem in new clothes, and it has been penalised for two decades in ordinary search. The safe version of this work is making one accurate description machine-readable, not writing a second description for machines.