AI agents move from advice to checkout
In May 2026 Amazon merged its AI shopping assistant Rufus with voice assistant Alexa+ and launched Auto-Buy: a shopper sets a target price, and the assistant completes the purchase once the price drops to that level, using stored payment details. Delivery platform Glovo opened its catalogue to search through ChatGPT and Claude this year, building its own Discover MCP (Model Context Protocol, a standard giving outside AI systems structured access to a service’s data) 1.
Commerce platform Shopify is building Agentic Storefronts to let merchants sell directly inside AI chats. By Shopify’s own count, orders on its merchants’ stores attributed to AI search and recommendations grew 15x between January and December 2025 — a self-reported figure, not an independent measurement 1.
Google strips free product listings across Europe
On 17–18 September, Google removed free product listings and its popular-products carousel from search results across the European Economic Area — blocks that let a retailer appear in shopping results without bidding in an ad auction. Trackers recorded visibility falling 90–100% in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands, with the space handed to comparison shopping services (independent sites showing a product’s price across multiple stores) 2. Google’s Ginny Marvin confirmed the change follows a requirement of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA, legislation limiting large platforms from favouring their own services in search results) 2.
Ad execs expect agentic buying to scale within a year, but the industry still runs on two standards
A survey by IAB Europe (the European trade body for interactive advertising) among 50 ad executives across 44 markets found 58% expect agentic ad buying — where an AI agent, not a person, negotiates placement and launches a campaign — to reach scale within a year. At companies with more than 500 staff, 86% already run systems where people and AI agents plan and execute together; among smaller companies, only 48% do 3.
On 23 September, Adform’s CTO Jochen Schlosser compared IAB Tech Lab’s AAMP protocol, built on the familiar OpenRTB (the protocol behind real-time ad auctions), with the independent AdCP: both do the same job, but almost no real money moves through either yet 4.
Sources
- ↑Retailers.ua, 24 September 2026 — AI already buys instead of people: how Amazon, Glovo, Silpo and Varus are changing online shopping
- ↑PPC Land, 19 September 2026 — Google drops free shopping listings across Europe in two days
- ↑Digiday, 24 September 2026 — 58% of ad execs expect agentic buying to hit scale within a year, according to IAB Europe research
- ↑PPC Land, 24 September 2026 — Neither of ad tech’s two AI agent protocols runs at scale, Adform CTO says
