Happy Sunday!

I'm running HYROX today, so I'm going to keep this one focused. By the time you read this, I'm either going to feel incredible or question every decision that led me to this Sunday evening. But regardless, I want to talk about something that has been coming up in conversations with brands are are noticing the effects of agentic/bot traffic on their business, and how to prepare.

Quick housekeeping… On Wednesday, June 25th, we're hosting the Ecom AI Summit at Webster Hall in NYC. A full day with the operators, founders, and brand leaders who are actually using AI to run, scale, and create at their brands... AI-operator firesides, AI creative machine building, live hackathons, the whole nine. Get a free ticket with my link here!

Now before we get into the website stuff...

Vendor of the Week

RetailClub AI Festival — the only retail conference built for the version of the industry that's about to exist, not the one we're leaving.

Most retail conferences in 2026 still feel like they're running the 2018 playbook. Beige convention centers. Badge scanning. Sponsor booths in a grid. A keynote about "AI in retail" that's really an omnichannel deck with a new sticker on it.

RetailClub is the new event from the founders of Shoptalk, and the premise is that AI isn't a topic on the agenda... it's the thing reshaping the economy, society, and culture retail sits on top of. So the agenda confronts the harder questions most events avoid.

It looks different too. Three days fully outdoors on a one-third-mile beachside boardwalk in Huntington Beach. Three stages, 250+ sponsors, 150+ speakers, 2,000+ retail and brand executives. Plus Breakthru Meetings... double opt-in, 15-minute matches based on what you're actually trying to solve, instead of walking floors trying to figure out who anyone is.

If you're a retailer or brand, there's a free hosted ticket program worth looking at.

Grab your ticket here.

Your Website IS Your Source of Truth!

There's something I've been thinking about all week while working on a website project for one of the biggest food companies in the world. This company distributes primarily through retail. So the website is not really a traditional eCommerce site. Here, the goal isn’t to get someone to click "add to cart." The goal is to be the source of truth for the brand's products.

That used to mean helping a human understand what exists, where to buy it, and why they should care. Now it means that search engines, AI agents, retail platforms, ad platforms, creators, and every other digital layer can understand the brand correctly.

Side note - this is not a newsletter about ranking in ChatGPT or showing up in AI shopping results. That framing is too small. This is about agentic commerce. Customers are going to shop inside LLM chat windows. They're also going to use apps and agents that compare products, make decisions, and eventually transact on their behalf.

If agents are going to help decide what people buy, brands need to make themselves easier for agents to understand. That's the shift most brands are underestimating. Your website is not a brochure anymore. It's source material.

The old internet vs. the new internet

For years, the internet worked in a familiar loop. A brand published information. Google crawled it. A customer searched. Google showed links. The customer clicked, read, compared, and decided. The brand made the site useful. Google did the organizing. That’s not necessarily what things will look like going forward.

Now someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Meta AI, or a shopping assistant what to buy, whether it's worth it, how it compares, or which product is best for a specific need. The answer happens before the click. And soon, the action happens before the brand site ever gets a visit.

After you ask, you don’t see it, but an agent compares five products, checks reviews, weighs availability, evaluates price, and routes the purchase through whatever retailer makes sense. Your brand gets compressed into a few sentences before the customer ever lands on your site. If the source material is clean, the answer has a chance of being accurate. If the source material is vague, outdated, or scattered, the answer gets worse. And in an agentic commerce environment, "worse" usually means you never make the shortlist.

There's also a traffic story underneath this. Most credible reporting now puts automated traffic at somewhere around half of all web traffic. Some of it is fraud. Some of it is scraping. Some of it is search crawlers. Some of it is AI systems trying to understand the internet. Some of it is the new discovery layer.

The point isn't that every bot is good or bad. The point is that brands can no longer assume every website visitor is a human with purchase intent. That's a real shift in what a website is actually for. A lot of the Meta performance weirdness people are talking about lately is probably a mix of attribution, creative fatigue, Meta itself, and noisier traffic. Bots aren't the whole story. But traffic quality is genuinely harder to read than it used to be.

Why this matters for retail brands and DTC brands

A retail brand may not own checkout. But it still needs to own the truth.

The website needs to explain what the product is, which variants exist, where to buy it, what the ingredients are, what claims are accurate, which retailer pages are current, what common questions customers actually ask, how products compare, and what should show up in search and AI answers. It’s not just a retail issue.

A PDP is not only a conversion page anymore. It's a product briefing for humans, search engines, ad platforms, AI agents, comparison engines, and the agentic commerce apps that will eventually make decisions on the customer's behalf. Your landing pages, your FAQs, your reviews, your subscription pages, your Google Merchant Center feeds... all of it is being read by something other than a person.

What a "agentic-friendly brand" actually looks like

When I think about what to do about this, it lands in a few practical buckets.

Canonical product pages. Every SKU needs one clean source of truth. Exact name, variant, size, packaging, description, ingredients, where to buy, what it's for. If the brand doesn't define the product clearly, someone else will.

Structured data and clean HTML. Product schema. FAQ schema. Breadcrumbs. Organization schema. Text that's actually crawlable, not buried inside images. Design matters, but the markup matters too.

Clear product language. Cut the brand-speak. "Made for modern life," "your daily ritual," "crafted for every occasion." AI doesn't reward vibes. It rewards clarity. Tell the reader what it is, who it's for, when to use it, how it compares.

Claims and proof on the page. Especially for food, beverage, supplements, beauty, and wellness. Ingredients, certifications, allergens, substantiated claims, regulatory-safe language. The product page should be an evidence page, not just a sales page.

Retail routing. Store locator, retailer links, Instacart and Amazon and Walmart paths where they apply, geo-aware where-to-buy. If the site creates demand but doesn't route it, the brand leaks value.

FAQs written the way people actually ask. "Is this spicy?" "Does this contain peanuts?" "Can I buy this on Instacart?" "How does this compare to X?" FAQs are not legal afterthoughts. They are answer-engine inputs.

Freshness everywhere. Current products, current packaging, current retailer links, discontinued items marked clearly, clean redirects. If your source of truth is outdated, every system downstream gets worse.

Consistency across the open internet. AI doesn't only read your site. It reads your Amazon listing, your Walmart page, your Instacart entry, your reviews, your Reddit threads, your YouTube videos, your press, your Google Merchant Center feed. If your brand says one thing and the rest of the internet says another, the rest of the internet usually wins. This is where products like Salsify come into play… and where a lot of AI companies are trying to say they can help you control it all (whether they can or not is a different topic). 

That's all for this week

This is one of the reasons I'm excited for the AI Summit on June 25th… Not because brands need another conversation about prompts. The bigger question is how AI changes discovery, conversion, creative, customer service, operations, search, and commerce itself.

If AI is going to sit between the customer and the brand, brands need to understand how to show up in that environment. The winners aren't going to be the companies that say "we use AI" the most. They'll be the companies that understand how the AI-mediated internet actually works.

It's Sunday, so make sure you take care of yourself going into the new week. Go for walks, call your friends, stay social, get sweaty, whatever floats your boat. I'll let you know how HYROX went next week!

Hope to see many of you at the AI Summit in NYC on June 25th. Have an amazing upcoming week!

PS: For Google Advertisers!

If you've spent money on Google Ads, you might be owed some of it back.

This one's a little different from my usual mentions, it's not a sponsorship. I just think you should know about it.

There's an active arbitration process right now against Google due to multiple U.S. courts and regulators having determined that Google engaged in anticompetitive practices in its advertising business. If your brand has spent on Google Ads (and let's be honest, most of you have), you could be eligible to recover a portion of that spend.

Keller Postman LLP (with Sentinel Law PLLC as co-counsel), a leading class action and mass arbitration law firm, has assembled a large portfolio of these arbitration claims against Google. The law firm handles the entire process end-to-end, from claim preparation to resolution.

Here's why I'm sharing this: most brands I work with have spent hundreds of thousands (if not millions) on Google Ads over the years. Even recovering a fraction of that is real money you can reinvest back into growth. The filing process through Keller Postman takes minutes, not months. And there's no upfront cost to you... they only get paid if the claim is successful.

If you've run Google Ads, check if you're eligible: nik.co/refund

Attorney Advertising. This email is a commercial message about potential legal claims involving Google Ads. The sender is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. If you submit information through links or forms in this email, it may be shared with an independent law firm, for a free evaluation. You do not become a client of any law firm unless you sign a written engagement agreement. Any estimated recovery amount shown estimates the maximum possible recovery based on the ad spend you submit. It is not a guarantee. A case can settle for a much lower percentage or result in no recovery. Past results for other clients do not predict outcomes in your matter. The sender is not affiliated with Google LLC or its subsidiaries.