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.
The feed that puts your products inside ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers needs about eight required fields, not the seventy-plus that validator apps advertise checking. I read the OpenAI and Google feed specs line by line, and the required set is small, shared, and boring: id, title, description, link, image, availability, price, brand. The reason […]
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“How do I get my store recommended by ChatGPT?” is the question I hear most from merchants right now. Search it and you will find a hundred near-identical checklists, and most of them open with the same instruction: drop an agents.md file, or an llms.txt file, at the root of your site and wait to […]
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Today, August 18, 2026, is the day Google turns off the Content API for Shopping. Google’s own release notes put it plainly: “Content API for Shopping will be sunset on August 18, 2026.” There is no grace period and no soft cutoff. If a piece of software on your side still talks to that API, […]
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A written context layer next to the code, and agents that read it before they touch anything: the operating model behind DripSync and Pollen.
Read the note →UCP splits discovery from checkout. Discovery is opening up, checkout is gated, and AP2 handles payments separately. Here's what to do now.
Read the note →Shopify's Agentic Plan solves connection to AI surfaces. It doesn't fix your product data. Here's the line, and what to do about it.
Read the note →Checkout narrowed, discovery opened. Here's the honest split in OpenAI's ACP today, and what a store owner should actually do.
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I adversarially verified 25 high-stakes AI-commerce claims from 23 sources. 12 held up. 13 did not. Here is what fell and what merchants should ask.
Read the note →MCP, ACP, and UCP solve different layers of agentic commerce. Here's what each does and what to do about it now.
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Most AI-commerce tools are dashboards. I built Pollen so an AI agent can operate it over MCP. What that means, its limits, and why.
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