I started this newsletter mostly to force myself to keep up with all the new AI marketing news. Things are moving fast! I figured other people might want to learn about it too, so here we are. If there are topics or companies you’d like me to cover, please send them over. I’m a team of one person, so I’ll do what I can. If you want to connect, you can find me running the fractional CMO arm of Foxtown Marketing on most days.

Welcome to today's edition of AI Marketing Geek, your daily dose of the latest AI developments, tools, trends, and actionable insights shaping marketing in 2026. As AI shifts from experimental hype to pragmatic, ROI-driven reality, we're seeing agentic AI take center stage. Autonomous agents are handling media buying, personalization, and commerce, which is wild to watch.

This week Shopify told its millions of merchants something that changes the math on AI commerce in a meaningful way. Starting later this month, all Shopify stores will automatically become discoverable inside ChatGPT through a new feature called Agentic Storefronts, and merchants do not have to do a single thing to opt in.

Shopify told merchants their products will soon be discoverable and purchasable inside ChatGPT through its new "agentic storefronts" feature. "Coming later in March: ChatGPT in Agentic Storefronts," Shopify said in an email to merchants. "Buyers can find your products and complete purchases inside ChatGPT. This agentic storefront channel will launch by default for your store, and you will be able to modify settings in your Admin." Shopify confirmed the email and its contents.

The mechanics shifted slightly from the original vision. An earlier pilot allowed buyers to complete purchases directly inside ChatGPT through a native checkout experience known as Instant Checkout. Under the updated approach, Shopify merchants' products will still appear inside ChatGPT conversations, but buyers will typically complete purchases on the merchant's own online storefront, either through an in-app browser inside the ChatGPT mobile app or through a separate browser tab on desktop. Transactions will still run through Shopify's checkout infrastructure, and orders will appear in the Shopify admin dashboard like any other sales channel.

The retreat from true in-chat checkout is worth noting, but should not distract from the bigger structural move. AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores has increased 7x since January 2025, and AI-attributed orders are up 11x over the same period. Beyond ChatGPT, agentic storefronts also connect to Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Shopify co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, endorsed by more than 20 retailers, to create the infrastructure standard connecting all of this.

There is a fee structure marketers and merchants need to understand. Merchants pay OpenAI a 4% fee on sales completed through ChatGPT checkout, on top of Shopify's standard transaction and payment processing fees. Google AI Mode and Gemini currently charge no additional fees. That gap could matter as both channels scale and merchants decide where to invest optimization time.

The practical implication for any brand running on Shopify is that your product data is about to be evaluated by AI assistants the same way your website is evaluated by search engines. Clean product titles, accurate descriptions, rich metadata, and up-to-date pricing are no longer just good SEO hygiene. They are the foundation of whether an AI recommends you or a competitor when someone asks ChatGPT what to buy.

Retail media networks built a $38 billion business on a simple premise: shoppers start their product searches on retailer sites, and brands pay for visibility at that starting point. AI is quietly threatening to move the starting point somewhere else entirely.

Retail media search spend in the U.S. was expected to reach nearly $38 billion in 2025. The mechanism of disruption is straightforward: if a shopper asks ChatGPT for the best air fryer under $100 and gets a direct product recommendation, they never land on Walmart.com or Amazon.com at all. A decline in retailer site traffic directly impacts the retail media networks' ability to monetize their sites.

The brands doing the buying are cautious rather than alarmed. Brands like Williams-Sonoma and The Knot have started testing ads in OpenAI's ChatGPT. However, questions linger around high costs, brand safety, and limited data transparency. Marketers are cautious until ad-supported AI chatbots prove out effectiveness. Unlike retail media networks, LLMs lack the final point of sale. To truly compete, AI chatbots would need APIs, measurement tools, and transactional data, which are controlled by the retailers. "Of all the brands that I'm working with, no one is taking money away from retail media to put into AI ads," said one agency executive.

But the threat is structural, not just theoretical. Traditional search engine volume is expected to drop 25% this year as search marketing loses market share to AI chatbots, according to Gartner predictions. It is not far-fetched to expect a similar impact on retailers' ad business. If other AI platforms roll out sponsored ads, they could build super media offerings that compete directly with retailers.

Some major retailers are hedging both ways at once. Walmart, Target, and Etsy have all moved to bring merchandise offerings onto external AI platforms by partnering with Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and OpenAI. The argument for joining forces is that retailers want to meet their customers where they are. But data ownership and the potential disintermediation of retailers are chief among the risks that external AI commerce poses. When a customer's journey starts and ends within an external AI platform, the retailer learns far less about that customer's behavior.

For marketers managing retail media budgets, this is not a moment to shift dollars yet. It is a moment to start measuring. Track what percentage of your product category research is happening in AI assistants versus on retailer sites. That number will tell you where the disruption is actually landing in your specific category, and when it starts to move, you want to have a plan ready rather than catch up after the fact.

Shopify's Agentic Storefronts launch is this month, auto-enabled for every store. If you manage Shopify clients or run your own store, here is what to do before the switch flips.

The first thing to audit is your product catalog data. AI assistants surface products based on how well they can understand what the product is, who it is for, and whether it matches a conversational query. That means your product titles need to contain the plain-language description a human would actually say, not just the SKU name. "Women's Trail Running Shoes, Waterproof, Size 6-12" is better than "WTR-SH-W-06." Your descriptions need to answer the questions a shopper would ask, including materials, sizing, use case, and what makes it different.

Second, make sure your pricing and inventory are current and accurate. AI assistants will deprioritize or refuse to surface products with stale data, missing prices, or out-of-stock inventory. Run a quick audit across your top 20 products and fix anything that looks incomplete.

Third, check your product categories and tags. The Shopify Catalog uses specialized models to categorize and enrich product data before passing it to AI platforms. The cleaner your categorization, the more accurately the AI will match your products to relevant queries. Spend an hour cleaning up any products sitting in vague or incorrect categories. This will pay off across every AI channel, not just ChatGPT.

2026 is the year AI moves from "cool demos" to real and measurable business use cases. Expect more agentic tools, voice-powered targeting, and a focus on privacy-first data.

Stay ahead of the game by treating your AI reputation like your website. It would behoove you to make your brand easy for agents to understand and cite.

What AI experiment are you running this week? Reply and let me know. I'll feature top stories in future editions! (Everybody loves a good story)

Stay sharp,
Jon
@mistersterling
Chief AI Marketing Geek