By Mariano Gomide de Faria, Founder & Co-CEO, VTEX
Brand recognition and marketing budgets are no longer the only drivers of online visibility. Gaining influence is your brand’s ability to connect its digital infrastructure to the large language models (LLMs) powering generative AI-based discovery, ensuring your products can be read, parsed, and actioned by the systems behind those interfaces.
LLM-native platforms are already changing how products are found and purchased online, often without human input. A new class of AI decision-makers are already shaping how consumers shop. They scour the web, surface products, filter choices, and in some cases, trigger transactions. For brands, competing in an agentic AI environment starts with rethinking what powers your web presence.
Visibility is no longer bought. It’s earned through integration.
Many brands are still designing for the homepage, but AI does not always land there. It scans, selects and skips. As the web continues to shift, brands that over index on visually stimulating storefronts or narrative-led experiences must ask whether those assets are visible in the age of AI-powered discovery. A brand is either building for machine comprehension or creating digital dead ends.
In an agentic commerce environment, visibility goes beyond design and branding. Visibility now depends on whether data is structured, consistent and fully legible to the LLMs that power generative AI. Product attributes must live in standardised fields, with queryable pricing, real-time availability, and dependable fulfillment logic. What was once considered technical excellence in digital commerce architecture is now the minimum requirement for inclusion in AI-driven discovery paths.
Agentic AI does not scroll. It does not engage with tone or taglines the way a human does. It connects to structured sources and makes decisions in seconds. If product data is buried in long-form descriptions, scattered across CMS tools, or stitched together through manual workflows, the infrastructure is not compatible. If the commerce platform powering a storefront cannot support architecture built for LLM observability, it is not a commerce platform. It is a website builder with a checkout button. That might be suitable for presentation, but not for performance.
Integration starts at the infrastructure level
The customer journey could collapse into a single prompt. What once took a series of human-led steps may now convert a consumer into a customer instantly, regardless if the intent was strong or barely formed.
Brand equity and marketing strategy still matter, but no longer win by default. Today, marketing persuasion and technical precision must work closely. Storytelling is not just about ranking on SEO, but also about performing alongside Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). That means structuring product data so it can be read and actioned by Generative AI. If catalogue APIs are slow or unclear, the brand risks being skipped.
Evaluating how machine-readable a web experience truly is has become critical. Achieving this requires a commerce platform built for real-time interoperability, one that balances LLM readability with a performant frontend experience. If the vendor powering the online store cannot offer proven ways to support this need, it’s time to consider every option to stay visible or risk losing credibility altogether.
Wired for discovery or exclusion
Agentic commerce is already reshaping the market and will soon reach the core industries driving global commerce, including manufacturing and supply chain. What began with early adopters is accelerating. Payments are being embedded into generative AI interfaces. LLM intelligence also powers voice-led shopping, predictive reorders, and concierge commerce apps. The signals come from how tightly a brand strategy is wired to infrastructure built for machine-readable precision that the customer never sees.
If a brand’s web experience cannot be parsed by the LLMs determining which products deserve to be listed, the risk is not future irrelevance. It is a present-day exclusion. Maintaining visibility requires being present in every channel consumers use , especially where discovery increasingly happens. Otherwise the brand will fade as agentic AI builds the new digital main street without it.
