107 terms defined

The agentic commerce glossary.

Agentic commerce arrived with its own vocabulary, and most of it is used loosely. Every term here gets one sentence — no essay between entries — and a link to where we treat it properly.

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9 categories · every definition links to the article it came from

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By category

Five vocabularies, one market.

Agentic commerce borrows from platform product naming, catalog data management, search, and marketplace measurement. Knowing which family a term belongs to is half of understanding it.

Platform & products

18 terms

Agent-attributed revenue · Agentic commerce · Agentic Commerce Setup · Brand Agent · Confidence threshold …

Catalog & data

19 terms

Attribute coverage · Backend attribute · Catalog debt · Catalog enrichment · Category attribute template …

GEO & AI search

19 terms

AI citation audit · AI Citation Check · AI crawler · Answer-first structure · Buying-question panel …

Amazon-specific

12 terms

A+ Content · A+ Premium · ACOS · Browse node · Browse tree …

Measurement & delivery

5 terms

Agentic Commerce Readiness Score · Field framework · QBR · Readiness checklist · White-label delivery

Shopify

10 terms

Agent-collected context · Checkout extensibility · Core Web Vitals · Decoupled system · Field data vs lab data …

Cross-border & sourcing

11 terms

Children's Product Certificate · Commercial invoice · Conversion spread · Importer of record · ISF …

Growth & retention

10 terms

Agent-influenced arrival · Double opt-in · Engaged subscriber · Machine-visible trust · Owned channel …

Agency & delivery

3 terms

Agentic commerce lead · Fixed-scope logic · Productized install

A–Z

Every term, one sentence each.

Definitions are written to be lifted: one sentence, no hedging, no marketing. Follow any term for where it comes up across the library.

A

A+ ContentAmazon-specific: Amazon's enhanced brand content module on a listing, which increasingly needs to carry structured, factual detail because Rufus draws on it when answering shopper questions.
A+ PremiumAmazon-specific: Amazon's higher content tier for eligible brands, adding interactive modules — comparison hotspots, video-led layouts, expanded comparison grids — and a larger module budget on top of the standard A+ library. Eligibility and exact module names vary by program and account type; the constant is more format, gated by qualification.
ACOSAmazon-specific: Advertising cost of sale — ad spend divided by ad-attributed revenue only — the older metric that understates efficiency once Rufus and off-site assistants drive organic-looking sales.
Agent-attributed revenuePlatform & products: Order value that can be traced to an agent conversation — either directly, because the checkout was initiated inside the conversation, or as an assist, because the shopper had a substantive agent conversation within a defined window before purchasing through the normal storefront.
Agent-collected contextShopify: Structured facts a shopper reveals during a Brand Agent conversation - stated preferences, product questions, unresolved needs - extracted and stored as tagged profile fields rather than kept as raw conversation transcript.
Agent-influenced arrivalGrowth & retention: A new subscriber whose path to signup included an AI assistant's recommendation, comparison, or summary - on-site (a Brand Agent conversation) or off-site (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, or Amazon's Rufus). Distinct from organic browsing, where the shopper found and evaluated the brand unassisted.
Agentic commercePlatform & products: Commerce transactions initiated, researched, or completed with an AI agent acting on the shopper's behalf, rather than a human clicking through a storefront unassisted.
Agentic commerce leadAgency & delivery: The person who owns the outcome of AI-facing commerce surfaces — Brand Agent behavior, catalog machine-readability, checkout configuration, and off-site AI visibility — across catalog data, conversation design, platform configuration, and measurement. Distinct from a developer who implements a single piece of it.
Agentic Commerce Readiness ScoreMeasurement & delivery: GigaCommerce's free 100-point, three-minute assessment that grades a merchant's catalog, structured data, and checkout readiness for Brand Agents and AI search.
Agentic Commerce SetupPlatform & products: GigaCommerce's flagship engagement: a fixed-scope implementation that gets a merchant's Brand Agent, catalog data, and checkout configuration live within two weeks.
AI citation auditGEO & AI search: A structured test of how AI assistants treat your brand when shoppers ask buying questions in your category. You run a fixed panel of questions across the major assistants and score each answer on a three-level scale - named in the recommendation, cited as a source, or absent - producing a score you can track and a gap log you can act on.
AI Citation CheckGEO & AI search: GigaCommerce's free tool that tests whether AI assistants currently cite or recommend a given merchant's products for its own core queries.
AI crawlerGEO & AI search: A bot operated by an AI company (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, and others) that fetches web content specifically to train models or answer live user queries.
Answer-first structureGEO & AI search: Writing the conclusion or direct answer as the first sentence of a section, with supporting reasoning and caveats following it — the inverse of narrative or journalistic structure, which builds to a conclusion.
Attribute coverageCatalog & data: The percentage of SKUs in a category that have a given structured field populated — the core metric for measuring how enriched a catalog actually is.

B

Backend attributeCatalog & data: Amazon search terms and fields that aren't shown on the listing but still feed indexing and, increasingly, Rufus's ability to answer questions about the product.
Brand AgentPlatform & products: Shopify's merchant-controlled AI shopping assistant, shipped in the Spring '26 edition on June 17, 2026, currently available to Shopify Plus merchants only.
Browse nodeAmazon-specific: A single category or sub-category position in Amazon's browse tree — the hierarchical structure shoppers navigate through department and category pages. Each ASIN is assigned to one or more browse nodes, which determines where it surfaces when a shopper browses (as opposed to searches) and which category-level filters and comparison sets apply to it.
Browse treeAmazon-specific: Amazon's internal category hierarchy that a listing is filed under, which determines what filters and comparisons a listing is eligible to appear in.
Buying-question panelGEO & AI search: A fixed, versioned list of 15-30 questions phrased the way real shoppers ask them, mostly without your brand name in the question. Locking the wording is what makes results comparable between audit runs.

C

Catalog debtCatalog & data: The accumulated backlog of missing, inconsistent, or prose-trapped product data that silently degrades agent accuracy and AI search visibility over time.
Catalog enrichmentCatalog & data: The process of extracting facts trapped in product-description prose and turning them into structured fields an agent can query directly.
Category attribute templateCatalog & data: A fixed, reusable list of the attribute fields every SKU in a given category must carry — e.g. every hiking boot gets material, closure, waterproof rating, sole type, weight — built once per category and then applied to every SKU in it.
Checkout extensibilityShopify: Shopify's framework for customizing checkout using UI extensions and checkout functions instead of editing checkout.liquid directly. It lets merchants add or modify specific, sanctioned surfaces of checkout — banners, fields, upsells, delivery options — while Shopify continues to own and update the core checkout flow underneath.
Children's Product CertificateCross-border & sourcing: The certificate a manufacturer or importer must issue for any product designed primarily for children 12 and under, based on passing tests performed by a CPSC-accepted third-party laboratory. General-use products subject to a CPSC rule need the self-issued equivalent, a General Certificate of Conformity (GCC).
CitationGEO & AI search: An instance of an AI assistant referencing or recommending a specific merchant, product, or piece of content in its response to a user query.
Citation rateGEO & AI search: The share of relevant queries in which a given assistant cites or recommends a merchant's products — the core benchmark metric for Commerce GEO work.
Commerce GEOGEO & AI search: Generative engine optimization applied to commerce — the practice of structuring a catalog and content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity cite and recommend it.
Commercial invoiceCross-border & sourcing: The document that states what was sold, to whom, at what price, and under what terms — the primary document US Customs and Border Protection uses to value the shipment and assess duty. It must match the packing list and the actual goods exactly.
Compatibility dataCatalog & data: Structured "works with" or "fits" relationships between products, which agents rely on heavily because shoppers frequently ask compatibility questions by exact model or part.
Confidence thresholdPlatform & products: The internal setting that decides whether a Brand Agent answers directly or escalates to a human. Set too low, it guesses too often; set too high, it escalates so much the feature stops saving anyone time.
Constraint queryCatalog & data: A shopping request framed by conditions the answer must satisfy — a device it must fit, a system it must work with, a situation it must handle — rather than by a product category alone.
Controlled vocabularyCatalog & data: A fixed, finite list of allowed values for an attribute — e.g. material: cotton | linen | wool | leather — maintained centrally, so every SKU spells the same fact the same way.
Conversation designPlatform & products: The deliberate scripting of how a Brand Agent greets, questions, and guides a shopper — tone, fallback behavior, and escalation paths, not just the product answers underneath.
Conversation flowPlatform & products: A named pattern of shopper intent — e.g. 'compare two products on a specific attribute' — paired with the reasoning logic and catalog data the Brand Agent needs to answer any phrasing of that intent well, not a single scripted exchange.
Conversion spreadCross-border & sourcing: The difference between the true mid-market exchange rate at the moment of conversion and the (worse) rate a bank or payment provider actually applies to the transaction. It is usually not itemized as a fee, which is exactly why it is the most commonly missed cost in a payout comparison.
Copilot CheckoutPlatform & products: Shopify's AI-assisted checkout flow, released alongside Brand Agents in the Spring '26 edition — a Shopify product, not a Microsoft one, despite the name's overlap with unrelated Microsoft branding.
Core Web VitalsShopify: Google's three user-experience metrics, measured on real visits: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP, loading — good is 2.5s or under), Interaction to Next Paint (INP, responsiveness — 200ms or under), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS, visual stability — 0.1 or under).
CorroborationGEO & AI search: Independent confirmation of a claim from a source that isn't the brand itself. In GEO terms, it's the difference between a fact an assistant can state with confidence and one it has to hedge or omit.
Corroboration graphGEO & AI search: The network of independent mentions, reviews, and citations of a product across the web that AI assistants use as a trust signal before recommending it.
Corroboration layerAmazon-specific: The body of buyer-generated content — reviews and answered Q&A — that an AI assistant uses to verify, qualify, or contradict the claims a seller makes in listing copy. Strong corroboration produces confident recommendations; weak or contradicting corroboration produces hedged answers or exclusion.

D

Decision-tree chatbotPlatform & products: A support tool that matches user input against pre-built trigger phrases or menu choices and returns a scripted response or path. It cannot answer anything outside the tree it was given.
Decoupled systemShopify: Two systems that exchange only a narrow, well-defined set of signals rather than sharing full access to each other's data - so a change or failure in one does not cascade into the other, and neither system accumulates data it doesn't need.
Double opt-inGrowth & retention: A signup flow where the subscriber confirms their address by clicking a link in a confirmation email before receiving any marketing. It verifies the address is real and the interest is genuine - the foundation of sender reputation.

E

Engaged subscriberGrowth & retention: A subscriber who opened or clicked at least one email or SMS message within a defined recent window (commonly 90 days) — as opposed to a subscriber who is merely present on the list but functionally unreachable.

F

Field data vs lab dataShopify: Field data is collected from real visitors' devices and connections (the CrUX dataset). Lab data is a single simulated run on synthetic hardware. Google evaluates your store on field data — so a lab score can flatter you while real shoppers suffer.
Field frameworkMeasurement & delivery: GigaCommerce's shorthand for qualitative patterns observed across client engagements — used sparingly, and distinct from a formal published statistic.
Fixed-scope logicAgency & delivery: A pricing approach where the deliverable list is defined up front (catalog attributes enriched to a named schema, structured data live on every PDP, agent trained and tested against a defined conversation set, checkout configured for the client's tax and fulfillment rules) and the fee is set against that list, not against hours worked.

G

GEO vs SEOGEO & AI search: SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links; GEO optimizes for being the fact or product an AI assistant quotes or recommends directly, often without a click-through at all.
Google AI OverviewsPlatform & products: AI-generated summary panels shown above traditional results in Google Search, which can cite and link to product pages the way a human-written snippet used to.

I

Importer of recordCross-border & sourcing: The party legally responsible for a shipment's entry into the US — accurate classification, duty payment, and compliance with every applicable regulation. For a South Asian exporter this is typically your US entity, or you as a foreign importer of record with a customs bond and a broker.
Intent-to-purchase ratePlatform & products: The percentage of agent conversations that include at least one purchase-oriented question — about a product, a comparison, fit, compatibility, or availability — as opposed to pure support or order-status queries.
ISFCross-border & sourcing: Also called '10+2' — a filing of shipment and party data that must be lodged with US Customs before ocean cargo is loaded at the origin port. Missing or late ISF filings carry monetary penalties and can trigger cargo holds on arrival.

K

Knockout searchCross-border & sourcing: A preliminary, non-exhaustive search of the USPTO's trademark database (and ideally state and common-law sources) to check whether an identical or confusingly similar mark already exists in your goods category, before you commit budget to a name.

L

Landed costCross-border & sourcing: The fully loaded cost to get one unit from the factory floor to a fulfilled US sale, including product cost, freight, duty, marketplace fulfillment fees, marketplace referral fees, and an amortized reserve for returns. It is the true cost basis for pricing — not the FOB or CIF quote.
Launch driftPlatform & products: The gradual mismatch between an agent's configuration and reality that sets in when nobody actively tunes it after go-live — catalog changes go unreflected, new question patterns go unanswered, and the agent that was accurate on day one becomes gradually less accurate with each week of neglect.
llms-full.txtGEO & AI search: A companion convention: a single file containing the full flattened text content of the mapped pages, so an AI system can ingest everything in one fetch. Useful for documentation sites; rarely worth maintaining for an ecommerce catalog that changes weekly.
llms.txtGEO & AI search: A proposed plain-text file at a site's root that summarizes what the site offers, aimed at giving AI crawlers a fast, structured entry point similar to robots.txt for search crawlers.

M

Machine-readable corroborationAmazon-specific: Restating and expanding a product claim in indexable text so an AI assistant can verify it against the title and bullets. A+ content is the natural home for this on Amazon: it has the space the bullets lack and the seller-controlled detail that reviews cannot provide.
Machine-visible trustGrowth & retention: The subset of your operational performance an AI system can verify from data: review content and velocity, delivery-time consistency, return and dispute rates, published policies, and support outcomes. Agents can't feel your brand; they can read your record.
Margin headroomCross-border & sourcing: The gap between a realistic US retail price and your fully-loaded landed cost, after accounting for marketplace fees, launch advertising, and a returns allowance — the buffer that lets a new listing survive its first unprofitable months.
Marketplace facilitator lawCross-border & sourcing: A state law making the marketplace — Amazon — responsible for calculating, collecting, and remitting sales tax on third-party sales. Every US state with a sales tax now has one, which is why marketplace-only sellers generally do not register state by state.
Merchandising agentPlatform & products: An AI system that actively curates, bundles, or recommends products on a merchant's behalf, going beyond answering questions into making merchandising decisions.
Merchant of recordPlatform & products: The legal entity responsible for a sale: it charges the customer, owes the tax, handles refunds and chargebacks, and answers for compliance. With Copilot Checkout, that entity is you — not Shopify, and not the assistant the shopper was talking to.
MetafieldCatalog & data: Shopify's native mechanism for structured custom product data — a typed, named field (material, fit, dishwasher_safe) attached to a product, variant, or category, defined once and readable by themes, Search & Discovery filters, APIs, and AI surfaces.

O

Off-site assistantPlatform & products: An AI assistant that recommends or discusses products outside the merchant's own storefront — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are the primary examples merchants optimize for.
Option nameCatalog & data: The label for a variant axis on a Shopify product — Color, Size, Material — set independently per product unless you enforce a standard.
Option valueCatalog & data: The specific setting within an option — Navy, Medium, 100% Cotton — which must be spelled identically across every product that uses it, or an agent will treat Navy and Nvy as unrelated concepts.
Owned channelGrowth & retention: A communication channel where you hold the relationship directly — email and SMS lists built on explicit consent — as opposed to rented reach (ads) or mediated reach (assistant shortlists). No algorithm re-ranks who receives your message.

P

Payout railsCross-border & sourcing: The path Amazon's disbursements take to reach your company account — direct local-currency deposit where Amazon supports it, or a third-party cross-border payout provider where it doesn't. Your rails determine fees, FX loss, documentation burden, and how fast working capital comes home.
PIMCatalog & data: Product information management system — dedicated software for managing product data at scale, as distinct from using a platform's native fields for the same purpose.
Post-purchase Brand AgentGrowth & retention: A Shopify Brand Agent (Spring '26 edition, currently Shopify Plus only) scoped to post-order conversations — order status, delivery issues, warranty, product care, and returns — with access to live order data and the merchant's enriched catalog.
Product attribute schemaCatalog & data: The per-category contract that names every attribute a product must or may carry, its data type, its allowed values, its unit, and whether an empty value blocks publishing. It defines what "complete" means for that category.
Product taxonomyCatalog & data: The hierarchical category structure a catalog is organized under, which agents use to scope what "kind" of product they're reasoning about before checking specific attributes.
Product typeAmazon-specific: Amazon's category-level schema that determines which attribute fields an ASIN carries, which are required, and which values are valid. Every audit starts by confirming each ASIN sits in the right product type — a miscategorized ASIN carries the wrong field set entirely.
Productized installAgency & delivery: A fixed-scope, fixed-price, fixed-timeline engagement with a named deliverable list — e.g. 'Brand Agent configured, top-100 SKUs enriched, checkout live, measurement dashboard delivered in two weeks' — sold as a SKU rather than scoped per client from scratch.
Prose-trapped factPlatform & products: A true, useful product fact that exists only inside a marketing description rather than as a structured field — readable by a shopper, invisible to an agent's filtering logic.

Q

QBRMeasurement & delivery: A quarterly business review structured around agentic-commerce metrics specifically — citation rate, agent accuracy, TACOS — rather than generic traffic and conversion reporting.
Quotable contentGEO & AI search: Content written in short, self-contained, fact-dense sentences specifically because that shape is what AI assistants can lift cleanly into a generated answer.

R

Readiness checklistMeasurement & delivery: The step-by-step audit a merchant or agency runs through — catalog, structured data, checkout, and content — before flipping on a Brand Agent in production.
Retrieval-augmented answerGEO & AI search: An AI response generated by first searching for relevant live pages, then having the model read and synthesize from those specific pages — as opposed to answering purely from training data. Perplexity's shopping answers are retrieval-augmented, which is why what's on your page right now matters more than what a model "knows" about your brand.
RufusPlatform & products: Amazon's built-in AI shopping assistant, which answers product questions directly inside the Amazon app and site using Amazon's own catalog and review data.
Rufus testAmazon-specific: A practical check where a seller asks Rufus the exact questions a shopper would about their listing, to see whether the assistant can answer accurately from the current product data.

S

Seller disbursementCross-border & sourcing: The scheduled payment Amazon makes to a seller's registered bank account, equal to gross sales minus Amazon's referral fees, FBA fulfillment fees, advertising spend, and any other deductions for that settlement period.
Semantic searchShopify: Search that matches the meaning of a query to the meaning of product data — usually via vector embeddings — instead of matching the literal keywords. "Couch" finds sofas; "something for cold mornings" finds insulated mugs and thermal layers.
Server-rendering disciplineShopify: The degree to which a theme writes facts — price, availability, variant options, key specs — directly into the HTML Shopify serves, versus assembling them in the browser after the page loads via JavaScript. High discipline means an agent fetching only the raw HTML still gets the complete picture.
Server-side renderingGEO & AI search: Generating the full HTML — including product facts and JSON-LD — on the server so it's present in the initial response, before any JavaScript runs. The opposite of client-rendering facts into the page after load.
Shared foundationGEO & AI search: Technical and data work — structured data, attribute completeness, site architecture, page performance — that simultaneously improves classic search rankings and AI-assistant citation accuracy. It should be budgeted once, not split across SEO and GEO line items.
Shopify metafieldCatalog & data: A custom structured field on a Shopify product, collection, or variant — the mechanism most mid-market merchants use to add attributes without a separate PIM.
Shopify PlusPlatform & products: Shopify's enterprise tier, currently the only tier with access to Brand Agents and Copilot Checkout — a gating factor merchants on lower plans need to plan around.
Shopping-context alt textCatalog & data: Alt text written to answer a shopper's implicit question about that specific image — what product, which attribute, what context — rather than to maximize keyword density for search ranking.
SPAGAmazon-specific: A campaign structure in which each ad group contains exactly one ASIN (or one parent-child variation family treated as one unit), so every keyword, bid, and dollar of spend in that ad group maps to a single product with no blending.
SPaG PPC structureAmazon-specific: Single Product ad Group advertising structure, in which each ad group targets one SKU — the standard architecture for keeping Amazon PPC data clean enough to act on.
Structured attributeCatalog & data: A named, machine-readable field with a discrete value — material: leather, sleeve_length: short — as opposed to the same fact buried in a marketing sentence.
Structured dataGEO & AI search: Markup embedded in a page, such as Product or FAQPage schema, that tells both search engines and AI assistants exactly what a piece of content is, rather than making them infer it.
Structured-data parityShopify: The practice of auditing every schema type present on the old platform before migration and confirming each one exists, with the same fields populated, on the new platform after migration — treated as its own checklist item, separate from visual or content QA.
Substitution ruleGrowth & retention: A structured, brand-authorized statement of what an agent may do when a subscribed SKU is unavailable — reorder a specific approved alternate, ask the customer first, or decline and flag the gap. Without an explicit rule, an agent's only safe default is to stop and ask, which defeats the point of autonomous reordering.

T

TACOSAmazon-specific: Total advertising cost of sale — ad spend divided by total revenue (ad-attributed and organic combined) — the measurement Amazon sellers shift to once AI-influenced sales grow outside ad attribution.
Theme app extensionShopify: The modern (Online Store 2.0) mechanism Shopify apps use to inject blocks into a theme's sections, replacing older raw script-tag injection. Better for merchant control and removal, but still loads app JavaScript on render — consolidation still matters even on OS 2.0 themes.
Trust transferGrowth & retention: The degree to which a shopper's confidence in the AI assistant that recommended a product carries over into confidence in the brand itself, surviving past the first purchase into repeat behavior. High trust transfer looks like an organic-search-level or better repeat rate; low trust transfer looks like a one-and-done customer who reverts to asking the assistant again next time.

V

Variant dataCatalog & data: Structured attributes at the size, color, or configuration level rather than the parent product level — a common gap since many catalogs enrich the parent and leave variants blank.
Variant-level metafieldCatalog & data: A custom field attached to a specific product variant rather than the parent product — used for facts that differ by size, color, or material, such as weight, dimensions, or a fit note.

W

Welcome-list robots.txtGEO & AI search: A robots.txt posture that explicitly allows AI crawlers across discovery content — product pages, collections, guides, policies — while disallowing transactional and private paths. The deliberate opposite of the publisher default-deny.
White-label deliveryMeasurement & delivery: An arrangement where an agency sells agentic-commerce work under its own brand while a partner like GigaCommerce delivers the implementation behind the scenes.
WISMOGrowth & retention: "Where is my order?" — the shipping-status question that dominates post-purchase support volume. Trivially answerable by any system with live access to order and carrier state, which is exactly what most legacy chatbots never had.

Z

Zero-party dataGrowth & retention: Information a customer intentionally and proactively shares with you — preferences, intentions, context — as opposed to data observed from behavior or bought from third parties. It is consent-clean, regulation-proof, and more accurate than inference.
Zero-results rateShopify: The percentage of site searches that return no products. Every zero-results page is a shopper who told you exactly what they wanted and got nothing — the most preventable lost sale in ecommerce.

Knowing the words is step one.

One email a week on what actually shipped in agentic commerce, and the move to make about it. Written for operators, not for search engines.