New in AI

◆ E-COMMERCE · Retail Adoption

Six weeks out from Q4, three quarters of the biggest US retailers still have no direct line to a shopping agent

Almost the entire AI-shopping leaderboard reshuffled in a single quarter, and the catalogues agents will recommend from this holiday are being prepared now.

Chandni Melwani

Chandni Melwani

Founder & Editor

Aug 20, 2026 · 2 MIN READ

A store aisle lined with stocked shelves and numbered aisle signage Global Photo: Oxana Melis / Unsplash

The News

ReFiBuy published the Q2 2026 edition of the AI1000 on August 18, the first quarterly update to the agentic commerce readiness index it co-developed with Digital Commerce 360. It scores Digital Commerce 360's Top 1000 US online retailers on catalog accessibility, AI-referred traffic, the diversity of those AI sources and 90-day momentum. Of the 1,000 retailers ranked, 972 changed position in a single quarter; the median retailer moved 35 places and 641 moved at least 25. Only 225 of the Top 1000 have a detectable Universal Commerce Protocol endpoint, the emerging standard that lets an AI agent connect directly to a merchant's catalog. ChatGPT was the largest source of AI-referred traffic for 722 retailers, down from 844 in Q1, while Gemini-led retailers doubled from 16 to 32, Perplexity-led rose from 8 to 21 and Claude-led went from 1 to 15.

Know More

  • — What UCP is: the Universal Commerce Protocol, co-developed by Google with partners including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair and Target and announced at NRF in January 2026, lets an AI agent query a merchant's catalog directly rather than crawling the storefront.
  • — The stake: Salesforce forecasts that 20% of 2026 holiday ecommerce traffic will originate from AI chat agents — a mix, it says, of shopper-facing bots, autonomous agents running backend tasks and competitor scrapers.
  • — Scale does not carry over: only 10 of the 100 largest online sellers place in the AI1000 top 100.
  • — The new No. 1: Nixon, a watch and accessories brand ranked 722nd by online sales, overtook Online Labels, ranked 814th, by 0.03 points. All five Q2 leaders rank outside the 100 largest online retailers.
  • — The bar is rising: the AI1000 index average fell from 42.0 in Q1 to 39.7 in Q2, which ReFiBuy attributes to traffic spreading across more engines and selling surfaces.
  • — Category spread: automotive parts and accessories climbed an average of 20.1 positions while flowers and gifts fell 17.8. Lawn and garden, tools and fishing and hunting were among the biggest climbers.

Of the 1,000 largest online retailers in the United States, 225 have a detectable Universal Commerce Protocol endpoint — the connection that lets an AI shopping agent read a merchant’s catalog directly instead of guessing from pages built for people. That figure comes from the Q2 AI1000, published on August 18 by ReFiBuy with Digital Commerce 360, and it lands as Salesforce forecasts that a fifth of this year’s holiday ecommerce traffic will originate from AI chat agents.

The rest of the index describes a leaderboard that will not sit still. In one quarter, 972 of the 1,000 retailers changed position. The median one moved 35 places. Whatever this measures, it is not the kind of standing that compounds quietly the way search authority has for two decades — it re-prices every three months.

The target moved too. ChatGPT remained the largest single source of AI-referred traffic, but for 722 retailers rather than 844 a quarter earlier. Gemini-led retailers doubled to 32, Perplexity-led rose to 21, and Claude-led went from one to fifteen. A catalog tuned for one assistant was a bet on one assistant.

ReFiBuy’s Scot Wingo explains agentic commerce optimisation, the approach the AI1000 measures. Recorded by ChannelX in May 2026, before the Q2 rankings were published.

Size, meanwhile, has stopped predicting visibility: only ten of the hundred biggest online retailers make the AI1000’s top hundred, and the brand that held first place until this quarter ranks 814th by sales. Worth holding alongside that: ReFiBuy promotes the term Agentic Commerce Optimization and sells the service its own index scores. The finding and the pitch are the same sentence. What survives the conflict is the timing — UCP has been switched on by default across Shopify’s merchant base since June, and the catalogs agents will recommend from in November are the ones being fixed now.

Related

#Agentic Commerce#AI Shopping#Universal Commerce Protocol#ReFiBuy#Digital Commerce 360#Retail#E-commerce

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean that a retailer has no detectable UCP endpoint?

It does not mean an AI agent cannot find the retailer at all — an agent can still read a public website the way a crawler does. It means there is no direct connection for an agent to query the catalog as structured data, so product availability, price and variants have to be inferred from pages built for humans.

Why would a ranking move this much in one quarter?

ReFiBuy scores catalog accessibility, AI-referred traffic, the diversity of those sources and 90-day momentum, all of which shift as AI platforms change how they surface products. Traditional ecommerce position compounds over years; on these measures 972 of 1,000 retailers moved in a single quarter, with a median move of 35 places.

Should this index be read as independent?

Partly. The data is the first quarter-over-quarter measurement of its kind and DC360 co-developed the methodology, but ReFiBuy promotes the term Agentic Commerce Optimization and sells the optimisation service the index benchmarks. Its central finding — that readiness is not a one-time project — is also its commercial pitch.

Sources

Chandni Melwani

Chandni Melwani

Chandni Melwani is the founder and editor of New in AI, covering AI agents, M&A, and enterprise adoption. She holds a Master's in Management of Artificial Intelligence from Queen's University and brings a practitioner's perspective from her work in Data and AI leadership.

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