AI shopping traffic to US retail jumped nearly 400% this year. Your product feed just became your most important API.
Most operators still treat the feed as a Google Shopping chore. Titles, GTINs, the stuff you fix when disapprovals pile up. That mental model is about to cost people real revenue.
Here's what shifted in the last two quarters. AI referral traffic to US retail is up nearly 400% year over year. Traffic to Shopify stores from AI search is up around 8x, and orders from it close to 13x. eMarketer pegs AI-platform retail spend at almost $21B in 2026. The buyer is increasingly a model, and the model reads your feed.
Two rival rails are now live for this. OpenAI and Stripe shipped ACP - checkout right inside ChatGPT. Google's coalition is pushing UCP into AI Mode and Gemini. Shopify's Winter release syndicates one catalog out to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot. Same product data, many more surfaces consuming it.
So I've started restructuring feeds for a reader that isn't human.
A person scans an image and a price. A model parses structured attributes and makes a judgment call about fit. That means the fields most brands treat as optional are now the whole game: material, use case, compatibility, dimensions, what problem the product solves, who it's wrong for. The feed has to answer the question the shopper asked the AI, not just match a keyword.
The discipline transfers almost perfectly. The same Merchant Center hygiene that wins Shopping - clean attributes, accurate GTINs, rich product types, structured data on the PDP - is what gets a product surfaced and cited inside an AI answer. One asset, two channels, and the second channel is growing triple digits.
What I'm doing on accounts right now: auditing feeds for attribute completeness against the questions buyers actually ask, not against Google's minimum required fields. Adding the "who is this not for" data models use to qualify. Treating the PDP and the feed as one structured object a machine has to understand in full.
The brands that win the next two years are the ones whose product data is legible to a machine deciding what to recommend. I'd rather rebuild the feed now, while the traffic curve is still early, than explain to a brand in 2027 why they went invisible to the buyer that grew 400% in a year.
Ruslan co-founded Tegra in 2017. Runs the Google Ads practice - feed, PMax, search, attribution. Writes weekly about the parts of paid search operators are afraid to touch.