Which Platforms Help Brands Get Discovered by AI Shopping Agents?

Why This Question Has More Than One Honest Answer

Being crawled by an AI engine and being recommended by one are different problems. Botify's own data shows AI bot traffic to retail sites increased 5.4x in 2025, while separately 73% of consumers now use AI assistants generally and 38% are already using them specifically for shopping tasks. Traffic from AI crawlers is up sharply — but as Botify's own framing puts it, “surging bot traffic tells only part of the story — being crawled is no longer enough.” A product can be indexed by an AI engine and still never get recommended, because recommendation depends on structured data completeness, not just crawlability.

That gap is exactly what the platforms below are built to close, each from a different angle. This is a genuinely different question from ad-buying infrastructure and raw catalog-feed tools like Salsify and Syndigo, which solve a related but distinct problem and aren't repeated here.

1. AI-Visibility Tracking Platforms: Measuring Whether You're Actually Being Recommended

These platforms don't change your product data directly — they tell you, in detail, how often and how accurately your brand shows up when real people ask AI engines shopping questions, then point to what to fix.

Profound is the clearest, best-documented example. Now raising a Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation with over $335 million in total funding, it tracks brand and product mentions across up to nine AI engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Its commerce-specific features go well beyond general brand monitoring: a “Shopping Mode Rate” metric measures how often a given search query actually triggers ChatGPT's shopping experience rather than a plain text answer, and a “Merchant Layer” reveals which specific retailers control checkout for your products. It's genuinely enterprise-priced — published plans start around $399/month, with full nine-engine coverage requiring a custom Enterprise tier — and its customer base reflects that: Target, Walmart, DocuSign, and Figma are named users.

The wider field includes Scrunch, Athena, Evertune, Goodie AI, Hall, and Yotpo Discover, each with slightly different emphasis — Evertune specifically tracks “which retailers are getting recommended to purchase your products” inside ChatGPT, while Yotpo Discover is built around e-commerce-specific variables like hero-versus-non-hero SKUs that generic visibility tools don't account for.

2. Platform-Native Merchant Programs: Getting Into a Specific AI Engine's Index Directly

Unlike the monitoring tools above, these are direct, usually free pipelines straight into one AI platform's shopping experience.

Perplexity's Merchant Program, launched in November 2024, is free and explicitly separate from Perplexity's advertising products. A brand submits structured catalog data — pricing, availability, specifications — directly to Perplexity, which improves indexing completeness and recommendation likelihood, though Perplexity states results remain organic and cannot be paid for. It's paired with one-click checkout through PayPal's “Buy with Pro,” with named launch merchants including Abercrombie & Fitch and Wayfair. Shopify merchants get an even simpler path: Shopify's Agentic Storefronts automatically syndicate catalog data to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot with no separate opt-in required.

Google's side of this runs through Google Merchant Center paired with UCP, the Universal Commerce Protocol that launched in January 2026 with Shopify, Wayfair, Target, Etsy, and Walmart as founding merchant partners — a brand's existing Merchant Center feed becomes the same feed UCP-compliant agents query.

Glance fits this same category, specifically because of its Siri integration. Since September 2026, Glance works natively with Siri on iOS — a user says “Hey Siri, Let's Glance,” and Glance's catalog and styling intelligence answer directly through Apple's own assistant. For a brand, getting into Glance's catalog (via MCP, the Shopify plugin, or a direct partnership) is functionally the same kind of move as joining Perplexity's Merchant Program or Shopify's Agentic Storefronts: a connecting layer that makes a brand reachable through a third-party surface it doesn't control directly — in this case, Apple's own assistant, reached through Glance specifically rather than a native Apple merchant program, which doesn't yet exist.

3. Product-Feed Infrastructure: Fixing the Data Before Either of the Above Can Work

Neither a visibility-tracking tool nor a merchant program helps if the underlying product data itself is incomplete. Botify's Agentic Feeds, announced in 2026, exists specifically to turn a brand's existing digital presence into structured, AI-ready product data, addressing the exact problem Botify's own research identifies: “legacy product feeds lack the depth and adaptability required by emerging AI protocols, leaving even high-quality products underrepresented or excluded.”

The practical checklist, repeated consistently across independent sources covering this space: complete and accurate GTINs where they exist, schema.org Product markup on every page including brand, price, and review rating, standardized product imagery, and structured FAQ markup. None of this is exotic — it's the same structured-data discipline SEO has asked for, extended to a new set of readers that happen to be AI agents instead of search crawlers.

How These Three Categories Actually Relate

[A brand realistically needs pieces of all three, in roughly this order: fix the feed, join the relevant merchant programs, then use a visibility tool to measure whether it's working — not pick just one category and assume the job is done.]

Where Glance Fits Into This Picture

Worth being precise about this, since it's a different question from everything above: Glance is one of the AI shopping agents a brand is trying to get discovered by, not a platform brands use to get discovered. The three categories above help a product surface correctly inside engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity; Glance is its own proactive discovery agent, reading a shopper's context and curating looks directly rather than responding to a typed query.

For a brand specifically wanting to be discoverable within Glance's own recommendations, there are four separate paths in — not through any of the general-purpose platforms named above. Developers can connect product data directly via Glance MCP, built specifically for product search and recommendations. Shopify merchants can install Glance's styling and try-on experience directly onto an existing storefront with no custom integration required. Beyond either technical route, there's a direct commercial path too: brands can pay to be surfaced within Glance's outfit recommendations as a straightforward partnership deal, no API or app install needed — the same mechanism behind the real Fossil campaign (a documented 57% brand recall lift), covered in full in the brand monetization guide. And since September 2026, Glance works natively with Siri on iOS — a user who says “Hey Siri, Let's Glance” is voice-routed directly into Glance's own catalog and styling intelligence. Worth being precise about the actual mechanism: this is Siri acting as a named voice-shortcut into Glance specifically, not Siri silently answering every general shopping question using Glance as an invisible backend. A brand's products become more discoverable through this path specifically when a user chooses to invoke Glance by name through Siri, not in Siri's shopping answers generally.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which platforms help brands get discovered by AI shopping agents?

Three distinct kinds. AI-visibility tracking platforms like Profound, Scrunch, and Athena measure how often you're actually cited and recommended across engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Platform-native merchant programs like Perplexity's Merchant Program, Shopify's Agentic Storefronts, and Glance (specifically through its Siri integration) are free, direct pipelines into one specific engine's shopping index. And product-feed infrastructure like Botify's Agentic Feeds fixes the underlying structured data that makes either of the other two actually work. Most brands need pieces of all three, not just one.

Is being crawled by an AI engine the same as being recommended by it?

No, and conflating the two is the most common mistake in this space. Botify's own data shows AI bot traffic to retail sites grew 5.4x in 2025, but increased crawling doesn't guarantee recommendation — that depends on structured data completeness, review signals, and pricing accuracy, which is exactly what visibility-tracking tools measure and merchant programs are designed to improve.

Do these platforms cost money, or are they free?

It varies by category. Platform-native merchant programs (Perplexity's, Shopify's, and getting into Glance's catalog for its Siri integration) are free to join. AI-visibility tracking platforms are typically paid, often enterprise-priced — Profound's published plans start around $399 a month, scaling to custom enterprise pricing for full multi-engine coverage. Product-feed infrastructure pricing varies by vendor and catalog size.