Blog post
Win across all three eras of the web
Helping companies win when AI agents, not just people, are making decisions
Right now, your customers are operating across three eras of the web at once. "Help me find it"—the human web of tabs, searches, and comparison sites is still how most of your traffic arrives today. "Help me choose"—the growing LLM web is where AI synthesizes options, but the human still acts. And "Do it for me"—the emerging agentic web of tomorrow will be where an agent finds, evaluates, and completes the transaction on someone's behalf.
AI agents are your fastest-growing audience. Automated traffic is growing 8x faster than human traffic, AI-driven sessions nearly tripled in 2025 alone, and agentic browser traffic is up roughly 8,000% year over year.1 But unlike human customers, agents don't browse, scroll, or respond to advertising. They evaluate, select, and act. And if the data isn’t trusted by them, they move on. The sale is lost.
None of these eras have replaced the others. The question isn't which one customers are in. It's whether businesses are ready to move just as fast as the agents. To show up in that world and with those customers, businesses need to be understood, trusted, and eligible inside the AI systems making those decisions, not just visible to the humans browsing them.
To help businesses succeed across all three eras of the human, LLM, and agentic web, here’s what we’re announcing today:
- Microsoft Clarity’s AI Visibility expansion helps businesses understand how AI systems discover and surface their products and cite information so they know what to optimize for next.
- Universal Commerce Protocol in Microsoft Merchant Center and Copilot Checkout enhancements help businesses participate in agentic shopping experiences by showing accurate, structured product information optimized for agents or enabling faster transactions.
- AI Max for Search campaigns, Offer Highlights, and Audience generation capabilities maximize advertiser relevance in new discovery and decision moments through improved query matching, context-aware offers, and AI-assisted audience creation.
Get deeper insight into how AI and agents discover and choose your brand
Today, Microsoft grounding powers most of the leading AI assistants in the market with current, trusted, and authoritative information. Connecting AI systems to this real-time knowledge and context uniquely enables us to also provide insights into how brands show up in new consumer experiences.
As people increasingly use AI agents to assist in discovery and taking action, traditional web metrics like rankings and clicks no longer tell the full story. Brands need to understand how AI systems represent and select them so they can improve outcomes.
Expanded AI Visibility insights in Microsoft Clarity
In February, we launched AI Visibility in Microsoft Clarity to select customers and are now expanding access. These insights help you understand AI bot activities and citations, including which of your web pages are referenced in AI-driven answers and how often.
Soon, we’re introducing additional insights in Clarity AI Visibility, which build on citations to help brands understand why they appear—or don’t—in AI responses, and where to take action. These new insights help brands:
- Understand which pages influence AI responses, even when no click occurs, and how much of each response comes from your content versus competitors.
- See where your peers are cited instead of you, which topics they lead in, and where your content is missing or underrepresented.
- Get clear recommendations to fill content gaps, build authority across key topics, and appear more often in AI answers that drive demand.
As Digitas experienced, these insights become powerful when used to drive clear action.
Clarity is a free tool and you can try it today by signing up here.
Shape agentic commerce experiences
Commerce is a clear example of AI’s new roles in informing consumer discovery and helping them take action. As shopping moves into AI‑assisted experiences, the brands that win show up with the right product information and reduce friction at the moment of purchase. That’s why Microsoft is investing in technologies to give brands visibility and control in agent‑driven shopping, including support for open standards.
Future-proof your Shopping feeds with UCP
Open protocols represent the common language that AI agents use to communicate, which act as the foundation to driving business outcomes in the AI web.
Generally available today for everyone in the U.S., we’re introducing support for UCP-ready feeds in Microsoft Merchant Center. This helps businesses improve product visibility and streamline how your product catalogs get surfaced in Microsoft Copilot with accurate, structured data that you provide.
Separately, we’re integrating Shopify Catalog into Copilot via Microsoft’s commerce API. This integration brings millions of Shopify merchants’ products to Copilot. Shopify Catalog automatically structures, enriches, and syndicates product data in real time. This gives Copilot access to accurate pricing, inventory, and product attributes without merchants needing to build bespoke integrations or manage separate feeds.
Early results show top merchants on Shopify achieved nearly 90% growth in impression share in Copilot, powered by real-time feeds from Shopify Catalog, significantly increasing product visibility.2
Enhanced Copilot Checkout
In addition to surfacing your products, Microsoft helps merchants turn interest into purchase. At NRF, we announced Copilot Checkout to enable transactions directly within Copilot while keeping the merchant as the merchant of record. Building on that foundation, we’re deepening catalog data to over 500,000 merchants and expanding user reach to Copilot’s mobile apps.
We're also launching customer loyalty experiences in Copilot, which bring businesses closer to their customers. Target is an early launch partner and has enabled account linking in Copilot, allowing consumers to see benefits such as exclusive discounts and free shipping on the checkout page to its Target Circle program members.
These experiences are live in the U.S. today. Check out our Agentic Commerce onboarding site to learn how to get started.
Brand Agents drive conversions
Beyond Copilot, we’re helping to bring conversational shopping assistants directly to merchants’ own sites. Brand Agents, launched at NRF for Shopify merchants, have grown to support a diverse set of brands and are now expanding to WooCommerce merchants along with support for brand and policy materials and improved reporting. Customers are seeing real results with an average 2x lift in conversions compared to unassisted sessions.3
AI that advances advertising performance
As AI reshapes how people discover and decide, advertising must also evolve to effectively capture attention and drive conversions.
AI Max now in Microsoft Advertising Platform
AI Max, available in open pilot in May, uses AI to improve Search campaign performance through relevant, expanded query matching, asset personalization, and smarter URL routing. AI Max is an effective way to deliver relevant ads on AI surfaces like Copilot Search and Copilot Answers, where people’s questions are more nuanced and complex, as well as on Bing.
Importantly, advertisers steer the system by opting into AI Max and soon, by providing more guardrails like brand inclusions and exclusions, term exclusions, and messaging constraints. Unlike other platforms, Microsoft has provided transparency with search term and asset reporting right from the start so you can see how AI is driving results for your campaigns.
Improve contextual relevance with Offer Highlights in Copilot
As we evolve how advertisers show up in Copilot, we believe advertising in AI experiences works best when it earns its place in helping people make better decisions. Today, we’re introducing Offer Highlights, new ad experiences that enable brands to promote key product differentiators within the context of Copilot conversations. More than showing traditional ads below an AI response, these formats are purpose-built to deliver business information that supports relevance, trust, and better decisions for users.
For example, Copilot can highlight specific dimensions of an offer (or product) that matter most at a decision moment like free shipping or in-store pickup. Over time, brands will be able to highlight a broader set of benefits, adapting ads to the context of each conversation and query.
Offer Highlights are now available for retail use cases in English-speaking markets, and you’ll start seeing them in ads that appear on product detail pages in Microsoft Copilot, Edge, and Bing. Advertisers provide the differentiators they want to spotlight in Microsoft Merchant Center. Best Buy is among the first to activate Offer Highlights.
Audience generation for AI-assisted audience creation
We're also introducing Audience generation, an industry-leading AI-powered audience assistant, available in closed pilot in the U.S. and Canada. Only with Microsoft Advertising can you simply describe your ideal customer in a prompt and leverage Microsoft AI to translate it into specific audience targeting settings.
For example, type in "Brooklyn-based consumers aged 20-45 with disposable income, attending concerts and pop-up events this spring, and looking for nearby shopping and dining options" and AI will recommend demographics, locations, in-market signals, and even dynamically generated, custom-tailored audiences built by Copilot. No manual assembly, platform logic to decode, or pre-set segments to select. Just your audience.
Reach out to your account team or log in to join the live pilots for AI Max, Offer Highlights, and Audience generation today.
Learn more about these and other features we're building for an ads ecosystem for the AI era.
The foundation you build today determines what you capture tomorrow
The three eras aren't a roadmap; they're the current reality. "Help me find it," "Help me choose," and "Do it for me" are all happening right now, in parallel, across every customer base. The capabilities we've shared today are designed to help businesses compete in all three.
Clarity AI Visibility surfaces how a business shows up in the "Help me choose" moments: what AI systems can see, where gaps exist, and what to improve. Universal Commerce Protocol and Copilot Checkout open the door to "Do it for me,” making products legible, transactable, and trustworthy to agents acting on someone's behalf. And across all three eras, Microsoft Advertising gives marketers the tools to reach the right human customers at every stage of their journey, with AI doing more of the optimization work to improve performance.
The businesses that build for agents now will have compounding advantages as volume scales. Structured data, machine-readable products, measurement that goes beyond clicks—that's the foundation you need to start building today to determine whether you’re chosen tomorrow in the new AI economy.
Talk to your account team to learn more about these solutions today.
Want to learn more about the future of AI? Visit our AI Web Hub, where you’ll find playbooks, blog posts, and webinars to help you get the most from generative AI.
[1] HUMAN Security, The 2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmark Report: AI, Agents, Bots, and the New Threat Landscape
[2] Microsoft internal data; Feb 26–Mar 26 comparison. Analysis includes the top 100,000 Shopify merchants by GMV in the U.S. and Canada (as defined by Shopify), showing ~90% relative growth in impression share within Copilot Shopping.
[3] Internal Microsoft Brand Agents performance analysis, March 2026
Your input makes us better
Take our quick 3-minute survey and help us transform your website experience.
