Underwing
An elytron is a beetle's armored wing case. The underwing is what unfolds beneath it when it is time to fly. This is that layer of Elytron Labs: notes, analysis, and research on how AI assistants crawl, cite, and recommend online stores.
Google’s Universal Cart went live in the US on 15 October, in Search and the Gemini app. Shoppers can now save products from different stores into one cart that sits in Google Wallet, get price-drop and back-in-stock alerts on them, and check out later. You don’t sign up for the cart itself. What you do […]
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If you take payments through a Stripe Payment Link or a Stripe-hosted Checkout page, your checkout already offers AI agents a set of tools to read the order and fill in the payment form. You didn’t have to do anything. Stripe announced on 22 September that it had switched this on for all of its […]
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AI agents are probably already buying from your store, and most of those orders won’t be labelled as agent orders. Forter, a fraud-prevention company, published order data from its merchant network this month. In the last week of September, 65% of the AI-agent orders it saw came from agents that open their own browser and […]
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On 5 October InMobi announced that nearly two-thirds of US online stores can’t yet support an AI agent buying from them. Trade sites are now repeating that number as fact. InMobi’s own press release doesn’t support it: 37 of those 64 points are stores that, in InMobi’s words, “sit on platforms InMobi has not yet […]
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Since 5 August, every Shopify store on a regular theme has been quietly offering AI agents a set of tools: search your catalog, read your return policy, add to cart, go to checkout. Nothing to install, and no off switch in Shopify’s docs. I loaded five Shopify brands in Chrome on 6 October and called […]
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If you run WooCommerce, nothing puts your products into AI shopping by default the way Shopify now does for its stores. Three doors are open to you today without asking anyone: a Google Merchant Center feed for Google AI Mode and Gemini, a Microsoft Merchant Center feed for Copilot’s organic results, and letting OpenAI’s search […]
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If you sell on Shopify, your products are now offered to four AI assistants by default: ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta’s Muse. They do not work the same way. ChatGPT only sends shoppers to your own checkout. The other three can take the whole order inside the assistant, and Shopify […]
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If you run a Shopify store that sells to the US, Canada or Mexico, Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, can now find your products and complete the purchase inside Meta, without the shopper ever reaching your checkout. Shopify switched this on by default for eligible stores. That is good news for conversion, but the checkout […]
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If you sell through Google’s AI shopping surfaces, AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, the field that decides whether Google can find your product for a shopper is your product identifier: the GTIN. It is not a ranking bolt-on you add to climb higher. It is the key Google uses to understand what […]
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If you sell to shoppers in the United States, there is a good chance you can get your products into Perplexity’s shopping answers, and it does not work the way most guides selling “Perplexity optimization” packages tell you. Perplexity does not auction those product cards. Its own help center is blunt: “all product listings are […]
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