Michael Quoc holds 9 US patents and is the founder and CEO of Product.ai—a company building the truth layer for commerce.
Every CTO running an e-commerce stack is being asked the same question: Are we ready for agentic commerce? Most teams answer by counting integrations: UCP, ACP, MCP, Verifiable Intent. The integration list grows quarter after quarter. The layer underneath those integrations rarely gets audited.
Integrations move purchase intent across the wire. Whether your catalog can be read, cited or trusted by the agent on the other side is a separate question. After looking at 17 years of merchant signals from more than 515,000 retailers, we've discovered that the catalogs that survive agent discovery share five auditable properties.
1. The Identity Layer
Every product in your catalog has an ID. Whether that ID survives the next catalog migration, vendor switch or PIM rebuild is the first auditable question. Across the merchant catalogs we have observed since 2009, a meaningful share of 2020 SKUs no longer carry their original identifier in 2026.
