TL;DR: We recommend a "protocol hedge" strategy: product feed + structured data + MCP/UCP readiness, instead of betting on a single standard.
The journey we audit
Product query → recommendation → variant choice → price → availability → cart → payment → confirmation. The GeoFolks report shows where the journey breaks for your store — per platform.
The 2026 minimum
- Product feed compliant with OpenAI/Google Merchant specs, updated at least daily — a stale price is the main reason stores drop out of AI shopping programs.
- Product/Offer schema with consistent prices and availability.
- Crawlability for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.
- Stable checkout without anti-bot traps for legitimate agents.
Advanced level
An MCP server with catalog and cart, a UCP manifest at /.well-known/ucp, ACP endpoints with tokenized payment. The trust layer (AP2) is still standardizing — worth tracking, not yet worth building alone.