Google’s AP2 consortium continues to shift the emphasis from classic search signals to structured merchant data as the critical input for agentic shopping.

The latest guidance indicates that agents will increasingly rely on clean product attributes, availability, pricing consistency, and canonical taxonomy to determine which merchants surface in agent-recommended flows. This effectively creates a new version of “AI SEO,” one defined not by content optimisation but by data hygiene.

For merchants, this creates two implications:

1. Inventory clarity becomes a competitive differentiator
   Agents will penalise unclear stock statuses, inconsistent attributes, or missing metadata.

2. Multi-step agentic purchase flows depend on predictable data
   If an agent can’t reliably parse product details or dimensions, it will recommend alternative merchants by design.

The direction of travel is clear: agentic commerce will reward merchants who treat structured data as part of their commercial infrastructure, not as a secondary ecommerce task.