Growth & retention
Agent-influenced arrival
Definition
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.
Defined in Welcome Flow Rewrite for the Agentic Era.
Related terms
- Brand Agent
- Shopify's merchant-controlled AI shopping assistant, shipped in the Spring '26 edition on June 17, 2026, currently available to Shopify Plus merchants only.
- Rufus
- 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.
- Google AI Overviews
- 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.
- Owned channel
- 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.
- Machine-visible trust
- 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.
- Zero-party data
- 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.
Want to know where you actually stand?
Submit your store and get a /100 agentic-commerce readiness score across catalog, schema, product pages and checkout — plus three fixes you can ship yourself.