The Agent Selection Handbook
The handbook in reading order. Foundations explain how AI shopping agents choose products. The catalog chapters make your product data legible to those agents. The infrastructure chapters keep your store fast and open while agents read it.
Foundations
- Agentic Commerce OptimizationThe complete guide to agentic commerce optimization (AEO for ecommerce): make your catalog legible and preferable to AI shopping agents.
- How AI Agents Choose ProductsHow AI shopping agents rank products: the structured signals (price, availability, reviews, data completeness) that decide which store gets picked.
Catalog
- AI-Readable Product FeedAn AI-readable product feed leads titles with category and use-case and fills every attribute agents parse: the gaps are why agents skip you.
- Product Schema for AIProduct JSON-LD is the machine-readable layer agents trust when your page and feed disagree: ship Offer, price, availability, and review fields.
- Product Titles for AIAgents match shopper queries to titles almost literally. Lead with the words buyers type, not a brand name like 'The Luna'.
- Crawlers, robots.txt & llms.txtBlocking AI crawlers in robots.txt hides the page data agents read beyond your feed. Here's the allow-list and what llms.txt adds.
Infrastructure
- Serving Agent TrafficHow to afford being open to AI agents: edge-cache the cheap machine surfaces, allowlist verified bots, and measure the load. Not block legit agents.
- Information DensityMaximize verifiable facts per token on machine surfaces. Same content, different format at one URL is negotiation; varying it by user-agent is cloaking.