What agentic commerce means for advertisers in 2026

Advertising has long played a critical role in influencing purchasing decisions. But for decades, marketers have competed for attention by buying visibility: higher rankings in search results, premium placements on retailer sites, larger shares of voice across digital channels, and more opportunities to capture clicks.

Today, consumers are buying differently. As they search with AI, browsing becomes nonexistent. What once was a tool for merely optimizing advertising is now actively shaping consumer behavior and decisions.

The rules of buying have changed, and advertisers must  adapt with it. Koddi’s latest research, The state of agentic commerce (media), reveals that agentic commerce is fundamentally shifting  how consumers discover, evaluate, and choose products. As AI agents increasingly participate in shopping journeys, advertisers are moving from competing for visibility to competing for inclusion within recommendation systems and decision frameworks.

Instead of influencing consumers after they have already arrived on a website or marketplace, advertisers are increasingly competing to influence the systems that help  consumers make decisions in the first place. Product recommendations, AI-generated comparisons, personalized shortlists, and conversational shopping experiences are becoming new points of influence.

What matters now is not simply whether a consumer sees your brand. What matters is whether an AI system decides your brand deserves consideration. Here’s how brands can win in the age of agentic commerce media.

Why agentic commerce changes advertising

Agentic commerce is the application of AI agents to buying, selling, and monetization, where AI systems actively participate in product discovery, evaluation, recommendations, and—in some cases—purchasing decisions. Unlike traditional ecommerce experiences, where consumers manually search, browse, compare, and evaluate products, agentic commerce introduces a new participant into the decision-making process: the AI agent.

Instead of shopping via keywords, consumers may ask AI systems specific, focused questions like:

• What’s the best carry-on luggage for frequent travelers?
• Which running shoes are best for marathon training?
• What hotel should I book for a family trip to Orlando?
• Which insurance provider offers the best value?

The agent researches options, compares products, evaluates trade-offs, and presents recommendations. 

This changes everything for advertisers as recommendation systems naturally reduce the number of products consumers evaluate. Advertisers can no longer compete for the top sponsored slot; instead, they have to focus their efforts on eligibility and inclusion in an AI recommendation. While a traditional search result might expose consumers to dozens of products, an AI-generated recommendation may surface only a handful , and advertisers must fight harder for inclusion in these results. 

The new battleground is influence

So what does this actually mean? As the opportunity to win consumers shifts from impressions to influence, monetization does as well. Instead of paying to be the top slot, advertisers will now pay to be part of the AI recommendation engine.

Three emerging layers make this happen:

1. Access: Brands must first become eligible for consideration. This requires structured product data, accurate inventory, machine-readable catalogs, and information that AI systems can easily understand and process. If an agent cannot interpret your product data, it cannot recommend your products.
2. Influence: Once eligible, brands must compete for recommendation. This is where recommendation logic, relevance, optimization, sponsorship opportunities, and commercial models begin to shape which products appear in shortlists and recommendations. 
3. Outcomes: The final layer is execution and measurement, testing if the recommendations actually make a difference in sales. As advertisers evaluate agentic commerce investments, outcomes remain the ultimate measure of success.

In truth, these are the same key pillars for search that brands have followed for years: make sure you have the right metadata, make sure you’re paying for premium spots where it matters, and make sure you’re getting the right measurement. AI is merely a new channel.

Advertisers are already funding agentic commerce

Because agentic commerce feels new, it’s easy to assume that most brands are still experimenting. However, advertisers have already moved beyond curiosity and into active investment. Around one-third of advertisers expect to invest between $50,000 and $249,000 in agentic commerce initiatives over the next 12 months. Another third expect investments between $250,000 and $999,000.

Even more importantly, agentic commerce media is viewed as a key performance channel, with sixty-one percent of advertisers reporting that agentic commerce initiatives will be funded from performance and paid search budgets. Advertisers will expect these new buying opportunities to produce measurable business outcomes, clear attribution, and demonstrable return on investment. 

Seven in ten industry respondents say they require at least a 10-25% improvement in ROAS or CPA before scaling agentic commerce investments. If agentic commerce is going to earn a larger share of performance budgets, it must deliver performance-level accountability.

What advertisers need from commerce media networks

Commerce companies have the opportunity to make an impact for brands both on their owned surfaces and offsite, but they must have the right infrastructure to make it happen. 

In fact, many of the capabilities advertisers need to succeed in agentic commerce depend on the infrastructure that commerce media networks provide.

Advertisers increasingly need:

1. Better measurement: As recommendation systems on and off-platform become more influential, advertisers need visibility into how recommendations affect business outcomes. This requires new forms of attribution, diagnostics, and reporting.
2. Greater transparency: Advertisers want to understand why products are recommended, how recommendation systems operate, and what factors influence inclusion. Recommendation visibility becomes increasingly important as AI takes on a larger role in decision-making.
3. Stronger data infrastructure: Agentic commerce depends on structured product data. Commerce media networks must make it easier for brands to provide accurate catalog information, inventory signals, product attributes, and performance data.
4. Access to recommendation environments: Just as advertisers sought access to search results and ecommerce placements, they will increasingly seek access to recommendation systems. The networks that successfully expose and monetize these environments will create new opportunities for advertisers to influence decisions.

Five actions advertisers should take now

While the pace of adoption will vary across organizations, the research points toward five practical actions advertisers can take today:

1. Treat product data as a strategic asset: Recommendation systems depend on product information. Structured, complete, and accurate product data will increasingly influence whether brands are included in AI-generated recommendations.

2. Start testing agentic commerce budgets: The industry has already moved beyond experimentation. Brands should begin building internal knowledge and measurement frameworks now rather than waiting for broader adoption.

3. Invest in measurement capabilities: Attribution, diagnostics, recommendation visibility, and incrementality measurement will become critical capabilities.

4. Focus on influence, not just visibility: Advertisers should begin evaluating how products appear in recommendation environments, not just traditional advertising placements.

5. Prepare for recommendation-driven commerce: The future shopping journey will increasingly include AI-generated comparisons, shortlists, recommendations, and conversational discovery experiences.

Brands that understand these environments today will be better positioned tomorrow.

The future belongs to brands that earn recommendation

Commerce has always evolved alongside technology: search transformed how consumers discovered products, mobile transformed how consumers purchased products, and today, AI is transforming how consumers make decisions.

The advertisers that thrive will not simply be the brands that win the most impressions or generate the most clicks. They will be the brands that earn inclusion within the systems driving consumer choices.

In an agentic commerce environment, the most important question is no longer whether consumers can find your products. It’s whether the agent recommends them.