And why brands should be worried
There is a growing assumption in marketing that if something improves efficiency, it must therefore be good, faster journeys, fewer clicks, less friction, all framed as progress.
So when Google announced its move into agentic shopping, the reaction was predictable. Admiration, excitement and a lot of nodding along. AI agents that search, compare, shortlist and buy on your behalf, with shopping reduced to a task that can be delegated and optimised.
From a technology point of view, it is impressive, but from a brand point of view, it should ring alarm bells.
What Google is really optimising for
Agentic shopping removes humans from the messy middle of decision-making, meaning no browsing, no comparison fatigue and no emotional dithering.
The agent evaluates products based on price, availability, delivery speed, reviews and returns, then recommends or completes the purchase.
In other words, it optimises for efficiency, not meaning, and that distinction matters far more than most people currently realise.
How we got here with brand websites
Over the last decade, marketers have steadily reduced websites to conversion engines, shorter paths, cleaner funnels and fewer distractions, with everything measured against immediate sales.
That focus has delivered results, but it has also narrowed our thinking.
Because a brand website is not just a place to transact, it is one of the few environments where brands can build long-term memory structures, reinforce positioning and make difference meaningful over time.
Agentic shopping bypasses most of that.
An AI agent does not care about your tone of voice, your values, or the emotional cues you have carefully designed into the experience, it simply reduces brands to a set of comparable attributes, and attributes are easy to copy.
When brands stop being experienced
If agentic shopping becomes a primary buying mechanism, brands are no longer experienced, they are evaluated.
Price, availability and ratings become the dominant signals, yet none of these are distinctive brand assets, they are operational variables.
When brands compete primarily on variables, they drift towards sameness, and sameness inevitably leads to price competition.
Brand building exists to prevent this exact outcome.
This is not a performance problem
But it is a brand problem.
Agentic commerce will reward brands that are easy for machines to understand, clean data, strong feeds, competitive pricing and efficient logistics.
All important, all necessary, none of them sufficient for long-term growth.
Performance marketing optimises transactions, brand marketing creates preference, and when preference disappears, performance has nothing left to amplify.
Where GEO enters the picture
This is where the conversation needs to shift.
If AI agents are going to make decisions, brands have to influence the inputs, not just the moment of purchase.
Generative Engine Optimisation is not about selling through AI agents, it is about shaping the information environment those agents learn from, what a brand stands for, why it exists, where it has authority and what it is known for.
If a brand does not exist meaningfully at that level, the agent sees it as interchangeable, and interchangeable brands do not command margin.
The long-term brand issue
The biggest threat is not reduced website traffic, it is the slow erosion of distinctiveness.
Brands that rely solely on being selected by machines will eventually find that machines optimise them out of relevance, because someone else will always be cheaper, faster or more available.
Brand building is what stops markets collapsing into pure price competition, and agentic shopping accelerates that collapse when brand investment is deprioritised.
What marketers should do next
This is not a call to resist AI, that would be pointless. It is however an opportunity to rebalance.
Brands need to invest harder in clear positioning, distinct mental availability, category authority, content that shapes understanding rather than just conversion, and presence in the environments where AI systems learn, not just where they transact.
Performance will always matter, but without brand, performance becomes brittle, expensive and short-lived.
The real danger is not that AI agents buy on our behalf, it is that they do so without ever really knowing who they bought from, and when that happens, the brand has already lost.