OpenAI and ACP: what happened to in-chat checkout, and what to do now
Checkout narrowed, discovery opened. Here's the honest split in OpenAI's ACP today, and what a store owner should actually do.
Read the note →Underwing
The wing that does the flying
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.
13 of 25 vendor claims about AI commerce did not survive fact-checking
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 →ACP vs UCP vs MCP: the three protocols reshaping how AI sells your products
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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I gave an AI agent the keys to a store
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.
Read the note →We asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity about products our own store sells. 0 mentions in 45 answers.
We build Pollen to make stores readable and recommendable by AI assistants, and we run every feature on our own t-shirt store first. Here is the full probe: 15 unbranded shopper questions, three assistants, verbatim answers. Where the work already shows, and the gap still to close.
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