By Sam Hall
The AI Shopper Is Here: Retail Is Still Catching Up
AI shopping is changing product discovery, retail traffic and product data. What the research shows, and why merchants still struggle to see the full journey.
Insights & Field Notes.
Written analysis of merchant-observable agent traffic — what request logs actually show, what they cannot show, and how to tell the difference.
What this is
A small, slow series. Each entry carries a named author, a publication date, and a visible source list, and every factual claim in it is attributable to something a reader can check.
Entries describe merchant-observable evidence only: request-level signals recorded on surfaces the merchant controls. Cartograph does not claim to know what an external AI model concluded, preferred, recommended, or decided off-property, and absence of agent evidence does not prove human traffic.
What you will not find here
- No benchmark numbers or traffic volumes without a linked source.
- No inferences about model behaviour observed outside merchant surfaces.
- No customer data, and no aggregate figures drawn from private deployments.
- No placeholder or preview entries standing in for work that does not exist.
Read the evidence framework instead
Until the first entry publishes, the reasoning behind Cartograph's approach is already written up across these pages.
- How Cartograph is designed to workReadiness framework, evidence labels, and explicit scope boundaries.
- Market evidenceSourced demand-side evidence, and what it does not establish on its own.
- Agent commerce evidenceRequest-level signals AI agents leave behind on merchant surfaces.
- What is agentic commerceDefinition for merchants, and which parts are observable on your own property.
- AI shopping agentsHow shopping agents read product data and what those requests leave in logs.
- AI agent readiness checklistAudit across product data, storefront, checkout, logging, and crawler policy.
- Provider-documented AI crawlers and agentsSource-backed reference for crawlers, fetchers, and identity verification.