Agentic Commerce & Google Ads in 2026

Okay, all right, we're here the day before Google Marketing Live, and Fred, I've had you on the channel before, but it's great to actually be in Optimiser in real life. Yeah, so thank you for having me.

Of course, thanks for coming in, and, uh, thanks for interviewing me in my podcast studio here.

Yeah, it's kind of a good, good sharing space. But, um, hey, what we do want to talk about is that I feel like, uh, tomorrow at Google Marketing Live, the new buzz term, especially when it comes to Google Ads is going to be about agentic commerce. This might be new for some people, some people would be well aware of it, but I'd just like to ask you, you know, what for you, what does that term mean and what do people need to know about agentic commerce?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really that big shift that we've been seeing when it comes to how search is being done, from hunting through a bunch of blue links to actually getting a summarized answer. It's taking that same principle and going from search, find, click, and buy to just saying to your agent, hey, here's what I'm interested in, can you just go and take care of it and make sure it shows up to my doorstep tomorrow? And like, go and figure out all the details, I don't want to be bothered with that, just go and do it.

So I guess that's the theory of it, how it works. Like, can you give some, I guess, practical examples of how you'd see— so let's think a brand, uh, what's some examples that they should be thinking about for agented commerce?

Yeah, I mean, so if you're in retail e-commerce, then obviously what you need to be thinking about is your catalog and your data structure. So these agents are doing all the research on behalf of the user, and they are— they don't really care about sales techniques and psychology of how we sell something. So they're just going to look for the data and is this product available? Does it fit what the user wanted? Is it at the price point that my user told me that I could go and buy it for? And if that's all there, then they're going to go and do the purchase. Right, but obviously that takes a lot of the plumbing needs to be in place. And I think what we saw at Google I/O is that a lot of that plumbing is coming together. There's some big players putting their weight behind it. So it's really slowly turning from a really cool conceptual thing into something that very soon, by the— I mean, if you think about Q4 and the big shopping season, I think there's going to be a lot of agentic purchases happening by that point.

So especially in the early days where there's going to be a little bit more crossover, like where does that sit for brands? You know, are they— do they have to, I guess, essentially have two strategies running, or is it all going to be combined?

Yeah, I think you have two strategies now. Yeah, it's, uh, you've thought about your ideal customer profile and who your target audience is, and add to that list an agent. Now what's kind of nice about the agent is that the agent does represent those same profiles of people that you've been marketing to in the past, but also think about again, what I said, the psychology of, of telling someone like, okay, here's 3 options for the thing to buy, and they're all slightly different sizes. And so you're being nudged towards a certain price point, or there's anchor pricing, or there's all these concepts that have worked well because we as humans are susceptible to these tricks. But think of the agent— the agent is going to just be like so data-driven, and it's going to make a logical decision that works for their human.

So conceptually thinking about it, so brands need to start thinking about what data they need to put inside their own agent to be able to communicate to buyers' agents or potential consumers' agents. Yeah.

And don't even think necessarily about like your agent, right? Like I think what we're gonna see here is that consumers have one of the major agents. So they're gonna have Claude, they're gonna have Perplexity, Gemini, or ChatGPT. Those are the main ones. So Why would I go as a consumer and use Alexa's agent? Yeah, there's not a lot in it for me, right? Like, I just want to have this one agent that I prefer who— and I say who knows, uh, but it knows who I am, what I prefer. And so that's why the consumer will keep going back to that same agent rather than using a thousand different agents from every store that's out there. So if you're in e-commerce, don't spend too much time at this point building your own agent. That's not what it's about. Just make sure that whatever agent shows up at your website, it knows what it can do for the user. And the other thing to think about here is we've seen this, but there's a decrease in the number of impressions available. Yeah, because AI mode, AI overviews, they're just— you have less space for ads. So by the time the ad shows up, that ad damn better be the one that the user wants and the one that the user can transact on. So even if you have the right product, but the agent is uncertain that that thing is actually available at the price that it thinks it is, then it's going to say, well, let me maybe hedge my bet. Yeah. And go use somebody else's product because they've actually done these implementations with Universal Commerce Protocol. They have agent-to-agent payments. So it's a known quantity. I know if I'm going to show this to the user, and the user decides to transact, they're going to be happy. The thing is going to work. Yeah, right. So, and in the, in the limited advertising space that's available, you're going to be the one that's shown, even if maybe your product wasn't quite as good of a fit. Yeah, but the agent saw what it needed to see, and that gave it the confidence to show your ad.

All right, so there may be some people watching this already that are, you know, they're, they're feeling overwhelmed. And so let's just really bring this back to What's the timeline that you're predicting? And I know it's really, really hard to get into timelines, but is this something you mentioned, quarter 4 this year? Is this something that you think brands will need to start thinking about this year in 2026?

Yeah, I mean, I think it is happening now. Yeah. And I think consumers like this even. And a lot of consumers are going to say, but, you know, am I really going to give my credit card to my agent? And what happens? There was this example of a motorcycle gets bought by your agent. Yeah. Like, I don't ride motorcycles. I didn't want to spend $20,000 on this. Right, but let's be realistic, like these agents are going to operate within guardrails, especially if you use them from the big companies like Google. So, and even if that thing shows up that you didn't want, well, there's systems in place to do the returns. Yeah, um, and Google talked about sort of that reliability. So, so, but I think the consumer fundamentally— no consumer that I ever meet loves hunting through a site and finding the buy button and and putting in their credit card information and like all of these details. Like, I mean, I am so frustrated by how many times I have to pull out my phone. Yeah. Any given evening when I'm at my house because it's like, oh, you know, we're out of this thing or we're out of that thing or my son is asking me to buy this. Like, why can I not just talk to an agent and say, you know who I am, you know my credit card, you know where I live, just get me the damn thing. So I think this is why it's going to be so fast because the consumer wants it, the technology is in place from the big companies. And so everything's aligning to make this really possible. In the very short term. And even at Google I/O, we saw an example where, uh, one of the women on stage was ordering coffee through her glasses. Yeah.

And yeah, and I think, look, you and I are both old enough to remember when the ability to be able to buy something online first, and people saying, well, no one will ever buy online. So I'm not worried about that. One of the things that I go to, especially on the brand side, is where does discounting sit in here? Because you're dealing with an agent that potentially is just looking at specs and pricing, not the emotional side. So how are some things— because I'm always thinking through like a brand, how can they protect their pricing and their LTV and all of those aspects? Have you got any thoughts on what brands can do in that case?

Yeah. And so you live in Australia, I live in the United States. I know the United States is very heavy on never pay the price that's on the sticker. You always wait for the discount.

In Australia, we call it cheapskates.

It's a real thing. Yeah. And so I don't know if we're being cheapskates here, right? But it's just like you sort of know what the market operates. And even if you look at Amazon, so Amazon for a long time on Prime Day, they were getting flack for the fact that the thing that you presumably wanted was 37% off. But they had actually artificially inflated the price right before Prime Day so they could claim the higher discount. And so again, this is the human psychology. These are the tricks that are gonna stop working because at the end of the day, like I am price sensitive as a consumer. Yeah. And I have a price in my mind as to what something should cost or how much I'm willing to pay for it. But the whole thing, is it 43% off or 35% off or is it full price? Like ultimately that is a little bit out the window when it comes to these agents. But Google also showed an example where I was like, now you can set up, I can't remember what they call it, but you can go to Gemini and basically put a task that it keeps monitoring. It keeps doing searches for you in the background. And one of the examples was if this particular brand of fragrance goes below $15, just buy it for me, no questions asked, just get it delivered.

It's going to be like buying stocks. Yeah, yeah, stop, stop, stop your trades.

Exactly. Yeah, you put a limit order and that's, that's the same thing, right? So here's my price point, if you can find it at that price point, great. So, um, so yeah, I mean, I think the whole discounting is going to maybe matter a little bit less, but, but at the same time, we are seeing, uh, offers showing up on Google, right? And so through these, these feeds, there is still that 'Okay, maybe it wasn't your agent that was out there hunting for the thing that you wanted to buy, but we got your attention because you're looking at— yeah, whatever it is, uh, and here's an offer, and maybe that compels you to buy at that moment in time.' So I think it's going to be a combination of both for a while.

Yeah. And I guess this is a whole other topic that we won't get into, but obviously that then really, really speaks to the power of brands having a strong brand value that they can justify higher prices that users still want to buy their products even if a similar product is slightly cheaper. But the last thing I wanted to finish on is if you're a brand listening to this, you know, what should you be doing right now in order to prepare for this, knowing that this is going to be coming, or the functionality, even though it may not be widespread, but functionality is going to be coming over the next couple of months and this is going to grow really, really quickly.

Yeah, I mean, step number one is evaluate your bot settings on your website because, you know, historically a lot of brands have just said we do not want bots to come. Yeah. And it's sort of from this mentality of like, we expect humans to come and if the bot is just probably a competitor scraping our site. Yeah. But no, that's not the case anymore. Like right now bots are legitimately representing users and trying to do something on their behalf, which means buying from you. So don't stop them from buying. So make sure you allow agents and bots to access your data. And then when it comes to data cleanliness, We've for a long time had feeds, merchant feeds with Google. So these become much more important. Tagging up your website so that as a bot maybe doesn't look at the feed but looks at your website, it really understands inventory levels or not inventory levels, but like availability, actual price discounts, what is the shipping cost going to be? Let the agent fully understand what that transaction is going to cost, how quickly it'll show up and help them with that. So those are really the big things to play on now. And then some of the things like Universal Commerce protocol. You know, if you have a big enough brand, then certainly participate with this. Yeah. But many of us listening are probably going to be marketplace sellers. So we have a smaller brand that we sell through Target, through Amazon, through Walmart. And these big players are putting these commerce protocols in place. So, so long as you match their data feed formats, you're probably going to be in good shape. And Shopify, by the way, is one of the big partners, right? So if you're on Shopify, there may be a toggle that you have to switch on to do this, and that's really the biggest starting point.

Yeah, for me, that's the biggest thing, message that I want, is it just to really, really make sure that your product feed is as, um, is not only as clean but as detailed as possible. And making sure that not only do you have a product title— I see a lot of brands still that they just focus on the title— make sure your description, your attributes, you know, your sales, your shipping, everything is there because brands that have that data are probably going to be the ones that are going to be picked by these agents because, as you said at the start, there's no emotion there. It's purely on data or data that is coming through to their feed.

Yeah, makes total sense.

Yeah. Hey Fred, thank you so much for having me on my channel but in your house. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Thanks, Aaron Young.

Thanks.