The Future of Shopping: Google Insights & Best Practices

In today’s world of AI-powered search, users are taking their shopping journey away from traditional digital channels and towards more advanced AI platforms. Understanding how these models read product data is vital for ensuring your products are surfaced, seen and sold.

Our latest webinar, The Future of Shopping, is the first part of our webinar series covering how you can succeed in the world of AI shopping journeys.

The Future of Shopping is Agentic

Search is becoming more conversational, and this is mostly due to the rise of agentic AI platforms as an essential part of the customer journey.

Agentic AI evolves beyond the generative and predictive functions of AI, offering more in-depth research and reasoning, as well as acting on user requests.

Through platforms such as Google’s AI Mode and ChatGPT Shopping, we’re starting to see agentic search in action with more intelligent, personalised shopping results. This allows for product discovery, comparison and decisions to all take place in AI platforms.

Moving forward, agentic AI platforms will offer even more interactions between users and AI agents as part of their product journey, with native checkouts and offers embedded into AI search making product visibility in AI platforms a priority for many brands today.

Why are Product Feeds so Important for Agentic Shopping?

Your product feed contains all the valuable data about your products including titles, images, prices, descriptions and availability, amongst other details. This same data is used to match your products to relevant searches in AI platforms.

Getting your product feed data right in Google Merchant Centre is essential for ensuring your products are seen by the right customers. You can find out more about  product data here..

Product feeds are such an important part of agentic shopping innovations that Google has introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to create an open standard for how AI agents access product data. This requires structured, accurate and dense product data to appear in AI product recommendations.

How to be Universal Commerce Protocol Ready

The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is currently being trialled in the US and Canada however, there are no confirmed dates for the UCP rollout in the UK and Europe. However, knowing how to start preparing for these changes is vital for staying ahead of the competition.

Feed and Attribute Readiness: Ensuring your product data is high-quality and structured, with other key elements added as required such as the native_commerce attribute.

Payment: Ensure your payment partner supports Google Pay tokenisation to allow for checkouts.

Platform Migration: Prepare to migrate from Google Merchant Centre to Merchant Centre Next as UCP integration is only available in the Next interface.

Technical Backend Actions: Ensure all relevant teams are aware of the steps needed to make your site and product feed AI-friendly, including implementing core REST endpoints.

How to Optimise your Product Feed for Agentic AI

Retailers without structured product data which is optimised for UCP and AI search will struggle against competitors who are ahead of the curve on agentic search innovations.

Feeds are no longer static lists, but rich databases for agents. Having an optimised product feed will allow you to easily leverage the increased visibility of AI platforms, helping you show up in front of your ideal customers.

Today, there are four key steps that brands can take to ensure their product data is agentic AI ready.

Inform – Rich Assets: Use informative and detail-rich titles (30+ characters) and descriptions (500+ characters) with high-quality product data, which is optimised for your ideal customer. Focus on long-tail keywords and intent-based searches.

Engage – Creatives: Include a range of high-quality images (1500px) including 3+ additional images including lifestyle images.

Highlight – Trust: Key shipping signals such as price, speed and return policies can help your products stand out for searches where time is of the essence.

Show – Difference: Sale prices, product ratings and highlights can all help your product data stand out in competitive searches or when shoppers are comparing multiple products.

Agents Prioritise Consistency

Without standardisation across product feeds, agents can’t reliably compare products and recommend or purchase products on behalf of a user. To get your product feed agentic search ready, brands need to avoid the following:

Inconsistent Product Data: Different spellings, phrasing or missing attributes can make it hard for agents to compare values e.g. colour vs color, size vs shoe size.

Unreliable or Unavailable Data: Different price formats, outdated feed data, unclear delivery times and limited stock visibility can make your products untrustworthy in the eyes of agents.

No Standard Actions: Having different APIs per merchant, manual integrations and limited automations can make it hard for AI agents to make decisions. This is a major issue when AI platforms prioritise speed and efficiency.

How to Optimise for Agentic Shopping with FeedManager

FeedManager  is Productcaster’s premium agentic solution for maximising the potential of your product feed with end-to-end feed management. FeedManager’s core features enable brands to control their product feed and get agentic search ready.

Scale & adaptability – we work with retailers with exceptionally large product, publishing to many different platforms​.

Speed – our platform publishes quicker, creating competitive advantage; make changes & enrich feeds in minutes​.

Usability –we’re a digital agency that has developed our tech to enable us to be more effective & efficient​.

Affordability & Control – FeedManager can be taken as a SaaS tool and gives you complete control of how your products are published online.

Take Control of Your Performance and Get Ahead of AI Shopping with our Next Webinars

AI is becoming a major part of all digital channels, across paid, organic and affiliate marketing activity. Our next webinar on the 19th May 2026 will be looking at the impact that AI Max campaigns have had on paid media performance to help you make the most of Google’s AI automation and improve your ROI.

Register now  and go deeper into how you can take control of your ecommerce strategy in 2026 and beyond.

Or get in touch with the Productcaster team today and book a demo to discover how FeedManager can help you get your product feed agentic shopping ready.

 

Watch the webinar recording