Botify yesterday launched Agentic Feeds, a product designed to automate the creation and delivery of AI-optimized product data feeds for retailers navigating a commerce landscape increasingly shaped by AI agents rather than human search queries. The announcement, made on March 24, 2026, arrives at a moment when the infrastructure for agent-driven shopping has expanded rapidly across major platforms - and when data from Botify's own research suggests that most retail product feeds are not structurally equipped to serve it.

The New York-based company, which positions itself as a platform for AI discoverability and agentic commerce, said Agentic Feeds is currently available in tech preview to a select group of retailers. A general availability release is planned for the second half of 2026. According to Botify, one unnamed major retailer is already using the product to deliver AI-optimized feeds for more than one million products.

The visibility gap in AI commerce

The practical problem Agentic Feeds addresses is specific. Legacy product feeds - the structured data files retailers have long used to supply information to shopping platforms - were built for a search engine world. According to Botify, those feeds lack the depth and adaptability that emerging AI protocols now require. The company argues this creates a visibility gap where high-quality products may be underrepresented or excluded entirely from AI-driven recommendations, not because they are inferior, but because the data describing them is not formatted in a way that AI agents can interpret and act on.

The distinction matters more than it might initially appear. AI bot traffic to retail sites increased 5.4 times during 2025, according to Botify data drawn from approximately 200 retail and e-commerce websites. A separate report published on March 7, 2026 - co-authored by Retail Economics, Amazon Web Services, Botify, and DataDome - found that OpenAI's systems generate 198 crawls for every single visit they deliver to a retail website, compared with one visit per six crawls for Google. The implication is that AI platforms are primarily ingesting and evaluating product data internally, without surfacing referral traffic to the retailer. Being crawled is no longer the same as being discovered.

Consumer behavior data compounds the urgency. According to Botify, 73% of consumers now use AI assistants in some form, and 38% have used AI tools specifically for shopping tasks. Kantar research published in January 2026 found that 24% of AI users are already deploying AI shopping assistants. Those adoption numbers continue to rise as platforms add transactional capabilities.

What Agentic Feeds does

According to Botify, Agentic Feeds works by drawing on the company's existing crawl intelligence and cached content to build product data that meets the structural requirements of AI commerce protocols. The product is designed to help brands complete three core tasks. First, it generates feeds automatically enriched with reviews, question-and-answer content, and other contextual information that AI agents draw on when forming recommendations. Second, it is designed to adapt as protocol requirements change. Third, it provides measurement tools for assessing the direct impact of enriched feeds on AI visibility and product selection rates.

"AI agents don't discover products the way search engines do; they evaluate your web content and structured data to make decisions," said Joe Doran, Chief Product Officer at Botify. "Agentic Feeds gives brands a competitive advantage by turning their digital presence into AI-ready product data, so they can be selected, not overlooked, as commerce becomes increasingly driven by machine-led recommendations."

The product sits alongside two existing Botify capabilities: SpeedWorkers, a component of the Botify Activation suite that pre-renders and caches web content to make it instantly readable by AI systems at scale, and AI Visibility, a dashboard that tracks how brands appear across AI platforms including Google AI Overviews and Gemini. Botify said coverage for AI Visibility will expand further during 2026.

The protocol landscape driving demand

The timing of Botify's launch is not coincidental. Two of the largest AI platforms have recently introduced formal agentic commerce protocols that specify exactly how product data should be structured and transmitted for AI-mediated transactions.

OpenAI introduced the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) on September 29, 2025, co-developed with Stripe, enabling transactions from Etsy and Shopify merchants directly within ChatGPT conversations. The protocol was positioned as an open standard for AI commerce, allowing agents, consumers, and businesses to complete purchases. Google followed on January 11, 2026 with the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), published to GitHub as an open-source standard and launched simultaneously with commercial implementations involving Target, Walmart, Shopify, Etsy, and Wayfair. Microsoft launched Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents on January 8, 2026, positioning itself within the same competitive dynamic days before Google's announcement.

Each of these protocols makes demands of retailers that go beyond what a standard product XML feed can satisfy. The ACP requires structured data that agents can parse to understand availability, pricing, reviews, and transactional parameters. The UCP extends those requirements further, incorporating Google's existing Shopping and payment infrastructure. Where traditional feeds were optimized to be human-readable and broadly compatible, AI protocols require feeds that are agent-readable - a meaningfully different technical target.

Adrien Menard, CEO and co-founder of Botify, framed the company's position as continuity with its existing mission. "For more than a decade, Botify has helped brands be found as discovery evolves, and the next transformation is already underway," he said. "AI agents are reshaping commerce from search-driven discovery to machine-driven selection, and the brands that win will be the ones that become the trusted data source those agents turn to."

Real-world performance questions

The launch of Agentic Feeds arrives against a backdrop of genuinely mixed evidence about whether AI-mediated commerce is delivering commercial returns for retailers. Walmart, the original launch partner for OpenAI's Instant Checkout feature, disclosed in March 2026 that conversion rates for products sold directly inside ChatGPT were three times lower than those requiring users to click through to Walmart's website. Daniel Danker, the retailer's executive vice president for design and product, described the Instant Checkout experience as "unsatisfying" for consumers.

That data point is uncomfortable for the broader narrative around agentic commerce. Skepticism about the commercial viability of AI shopping agents had already been building since October 2025, when independent analyst Andrew Lipsman identified eight structural challenges including consumer preference for seeing options before committing, the complexity of return logistics, and fundamental misalignment between retailer incentives and third-party AI intermediation.

What Botify is addressing, however, is distinct from the checkout flow problem Walmart identified. The visibility gap exists upstream of any transaction. An AI agent that cannot adequately parse a retailer's product data will never recommend that product in the first place, regardless of how smoothly the checkout process subsequently works. Poor structured data and missing contextual information effectively exclude products from consideration before the consumer interaction begins. This is the specific technical layer Agentic Feeds targets.

Amazon's approach illustrates the opposite strategic bet. Amazon has blocked AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Huawei from accessing its marketplace, while simultaneously investing in its own Rufus AI shopping assistant, which reached 300 million users and reportedly drove $12 billion in sales for 2025. Amazon updated its Business Solutions Agreement in March 2026 with a formal Agent Policy requiring any AI agents operating on its platform to identify themselves and comply with new restrictions. That posture - closed to external agents, investing internally - represents one coherent response to agentic commerce. Botify's Agentic Feeds represents the infrastructure layer for a different response: building discoverability into product data so that any compliant agent can find and evaluate a brand's products.

What this means for marketing professionals

The marketing implications extend beyond e-commerce teams into broader digital strategy. AI search visitors have been documented to convert at rates 4.4 times higher than traditional organic search visitors, according to a Semrush study from June 2025. But that premium only materializes if a brand's products appear in AI-generated recommendations in the first place. Botify's argument is that the quality and structure of product feed data is now the critical variable determining whether a product is surfaced.

The shift has implications for how marketers think about their technical infrastructure. Traditional product feed optimization - cleaning titles, improving images, updating prices - was a discipline focused on satisfying Google Shopping and comparison engines. AI protocols introduce a different dimension: contextual richness. An AI agent evaluating whether to recommend a product does not simply check whether a title matches a query. It evaluates reviews, answers to common questions, materials, sustainability claims, availability signals, and other data points that legacy feed formats were not designed to carry.

The Brainlabs study from July 2025 noted that AI systems evaluate "credible, structured, and consistent" content across formats and platforms, regardless of which team produced it. For retailers, that consistency requirement now extends to product feeds. A feed that lacks review data or Q&A content may be structurally invisible to an AI agent even if the product itself has strong consumer ratings.

Botify is trusted by more than 500 brands globally, according to the company, including Etsy, Crocs, Macy's, Levi's, the New York Times, Farfetch, and Marks & Spencer. The breadth of that client base - spanning e-commerce, publishing, and fashion - reflects how broadly the AI visibility challenge extends across sectors. Macy's and Crocs face the product feed problem directly. Farfetch and the New York Times face adjacent challenges around how their content is surfaced in AI answer environments.

The announcement also follows OpenAI's commerce news shared on the same day, March 24, 2026. Botify noted explicitly in its announcement that the timing reflects the speed at which AI is reshaping digital commerce infrastructure. Brands that have not yet adjusted their data architecture are already operating with a disadvantage as AI platforms ingest and evaluate product information at scale.

Retailers interested in joining the Agentic Feeds waitlist can apply through Botify's website. General availability remains scheduled for the second half of 2026, though no specific quarter has been confirmed.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Botify, a New York-based AI discoverability and agentic commerce platform trusted by 500+ brands including Etsy, Crocs, Macy's, Levi's, Farfetch, and Marks & Spencer. The announcement was made by CEO and co-founder Adrien Menard and Chief Product Officer Joe Doran.

What: The launch of Agentic Feeds, a product currently in tech preview that automates the creation and delivery of AI-optimized, protocol-compliant product feeds. Feeds are built using Botify's crawl intelligence and cached content, enriched with reviews, Q&A data, and contextual information. One unnamed major retailer is using it for more than one million products. General availability is planned for the second half of 2026.

When: Announced March 24, 2026, the same day as related OpenAI commerce news, with general availability targeted for the second half of 2026.

Where: The product is globally available in tech preview to a select group of retailers, with the waitlist accessible through Botify's website. The broader context spans the U.S.-led agentic commerce infrastructure built by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft since September 2025.

Why: Legacy product feeds were built for search engines and lack the structural depth required by emerging AI commerce protocols such as OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol. As AI bot traffic to retail sites rose 5.4 times in 2025 and 38% of consumers already use AI for shopping tasks, product data that fails to meet AI-readable standards risks being excluded from agent-driven recommendations - regardless of the quality of the underlying products.

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