Issue Websites must now be legible to two audiences, human shoppers and crawling agents

Summary

Commerce websites now have to serve two kinds of readers, human shoppers and AI agents. CB Insights observes that agents increasingly crawl product pages to compare options on behalf of consumers. That requires product information to be structured in ways machines can parse, not only presented attractively for people. A new infrastructure layer is emerging to restructure product data for this purpose. One example is New Generation, which builds AI-native storefronts that turn static catalogues into data readable by AI, aiming to improve shopping for both humans and agents. Retailers that fail to adapt risk being invisible to the agents that increasingly guide purchases.