How small businesses can survive AI shopping: 7 essential steps (www.zdnet.com)

AI-enabled “agentic commerce” — shopping agents built into browsers and assistants (examples: OpenAI’s Atlas, Microsoft Edge integrations) — are starting to search, compare, and buy on users’ behalf. That shift matters because consumers increasingly delegate purchasing decisions to AI, which rewards discoverability, data quality, and reliability rather than traditional SEO or storefront polish. Big players (Amazon, Google, Apple, Mastercard, Oracle) are racing to own the infrastructure layers — payments, identity, supply-chain data and APIs — so whoever controls the data pipelines will steer most transactions. Mastercard’s Agent Pay promises a “trust layer” for permissioned, traceable agent purchases, but the model also opens new attack surfaces for spammers and fraud optimized to trick agents. For small businesses the takeaway is concrete and technical: be discoverable to bots. Follow platform data-format rules; supply complete metadata (GTIN/UPC, unique SKUs, titles, variants, prices, dimensions, stock); expose real-time APIs for pricing/availability; ensure consistency across listings, social feeds and aggregators; and treat data quality as the new reputation metric — bad or stale data will get de-weighted automatically. Think of this as “AI SEO”: structure and maintain authoritative, machine-readable product information so AI agents can trust and select your offerings in an automated, rapidly evolving commerce ecosystem.