How to Show Your Shopify Products in AI Agents like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini (Using Google UCP)

The way people discover and buy products is shifting fast. If you sell on Shopify, this matters to you right now.

A recent conversation between three veteran SEOs, David Quaid, Gagen Gotra, and Harprit Singh, put it plainly: Google, Shopify, and a handful of other companies have built something called the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). It is an open protocol that lets merchants send their product catalog directly into AI surfaces like Google AI Mode, Gemini, and other agent driven experiences.

So, instead of a customer clicking through to your website, an AI agent can find your product, show it to them, and let them buy it right there without ever visiting your site.

This is a big deal. If your product catalog isn't optimized for this new way of shopping, you're already missing out.

The Discovery Problem Nobody Is Talking About

If you are a brand people already know, you have a 50/50 shot at getting found by AI agents. If someone does not know your brand but is actively looking for what you sell, your chances of showing up drop to around 10 percent.

That is the discovery gap. And the way to close it is not through blog posts or backlinks. It is through your catalog.

AI agents do not browse your website the way a human does. They pull structured data from feeds and APIs. If your product titles are short and brand driven, like "Green Machine" instead of "Men's Wrinkle Resistant Slim Fit Blazer in Forest Green," agents simply cannot match your product to what someone is searching for. If your descriptions lack attributes like material, fit, use case, or care instructions, your product gets skipped.

This Is Not AEO or General Store SEO

We want to be clear about something because we get this question a lot. Catalog AI Enrichment is not Answer Engine Optimization. It is not general store SEO. Those things matter and should be handled through your blog, Reddit presence, link building, and traditional SEO methods.

What we are doing is something different and more specific. We are optimizing your catalog for the UCP, the Catalog API that Shopify uses to surface your products to AI agents. When an agent is shopping on behalf of a user, it queries the UCP. Shopify surfaces your entire catalog through this protocol to every connected AI agent. You want that catalog to be clean, rich, and well structured so agents can actually find and recommend your products.

Think of it this way. Your website SEO is about getting humans to find you. Catalog AI Enrichment is about getting AI agents to find you. Both matter. They just operate in different places.

How To get Your Products Recommended by ChatGPT or Gemini?

We spent time in beta with Shopify merchants, and we learned a few things about what was actually broken. Short brand names as product titles. Thin descriptions with no attributes. Tags that made sense internally but meant nothing to an AI query. Merchants with great products simply not showing up because their catalog data was not doing the work.

So here is what Catalog AI Enrichment does.

It audits your current catalog against UCP requirements and real AI agent query patterns. It enriches your product attributes, titles, descriptions, and structured metadata automatically. It syncs your enriched catalog directly into UCP so agents can discover your products in real time. It tracks how your products are surfaced across AI search and conversational experiences. And it identifies the gaps and inconsistencies that are causing your catalog to get overlooked.

Two things we added based on beta feedback that we are especially proud of: you can now search products in your catalog directly inside the tool, and we now generate better formatted descriptions in HTML so you can copy and paste them straight into Shopify without any cleanup.

A Question We Heard in Beta (And the Answer)

One merchant raised something worth sharing. Their brand uses short, memorable product names on their storefront, things like "The Sunday Tee" or "Cloud Jacket." They did not want to change those names on their website but understood they needed richer titles for AI discovery.

The answer is a metafield approach. Keep your display name as a separate metafield for your frontend. Use the Shopify product title for the descriptive, attribute rich version that feeds into UCP. You can do the same with descriptions: one version optimized for human readers on your site, one version enriched for AI agents.

How It Works in Four (4) Easy Steps

Step 1. Install Aimerce (https://apps.shopify.com/aimerce) on Shopify and find the feature here.

Full transparency, this will be a paid feature due to the cost of AI tokens.

Step 2. Aimerce fetches your top 5 products.

Step 3. We generate related prompts and test how your products rank against your competitors inside UCP. You see exactly where you stand.

Step 4. We make specific recommendations to your product titles, descriptions, and tags. You review them, edit if you want, approve, and sync directly to Shopify.

You stay in control. We do the analysis and the heavy lifting, but nothing goes live without your sign off.

Why This Matters More Than You Might Think

Average order value is one of the biggest risks merchants face in agentic commerce. When an AI agent buys one item on a customer's behalf, there is no upsell, no bundle suggestion, no email capture. Your AOV can drop significantly just because you handed your data to a platform and customers stopped visiting your product pages.

You cannot control all of that. But you can control whether your products show up in the first place. Getting into the UCP with a well enriched catalog means you are at least in the game when agents are making recommendations. Not being there means you are not even considered.

The brands that win in agentic commerce are going to be the ones who treated their catalog like a first class asset, not an afterthought.

If you want to see where your top products currently stand in UCP and what it would take to improve them, that is exactly what we start with.

Get started at Aimerce.