Estimated effective “tax”: 3-7% of transaction value
The trade-off: CPC models favor high-margin products that can absorb advertising costs. Transaction-fee models favor lower-margin, higher-volume products where you can’t afford upfront spend.
CAC Implications
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) in the agentic funnel is fundamentally different:
Old CAC calculation:
CAC = (Ad spend + Content costs + Tool costs) / New customers acquired
With multiple touchpoints, complex attribution, and leaky funnels, CAC was high and hard to optimize.
New CAC calculation:
CAC = (Platform fee or transaction fee) / New customers acquired
With single-touchpoint attribution and higher conversion rates, CAC becomes more predictable—but you’re now dependent on platform economics you don’t control.
Who Wins in the Agentic Funnel?
Winners:
Brands with strong entity authority. If AI agents recognize and trust your brand, you get recommended. Brand building becomes a technical SEO strategy.
Products with structured, real-time data. If your inventory, pricing, and product details are AI-accessible and always current, you’re in the consideration set.
Merchants with protocol integration. If users can checkout without leaving the AI, you convert. Without instant checkout, you lose to competitors who have it.
Categories with clear “best” options. AI agents favor confident recommendations. If your category has clear quality leaders, they win disproportionately.
Platforms that control the agentic layer.Google, OpenAI, and whoever else owns the AI interface captures value from every transaction that flows through it.
Losers:
Comparison and review sites. If AI does the comparison, dedicated comparison sites lose their reason to exist.
Long-tail and undifferentiated products. If you’re not in the top 3-4 recommendations, you’re invisible. The long tail gets cut off.
Brands dependent on discovery advertising. If discovery happens inside AI conversations, traditional display and awareness campaigns lose their leverage.
Merchants without data infrastructure. If your data isn’t structured and real-time, you’re invisible to agentic commerce regardless of productquality.
Marketing strategies built on funnel stages. Retargeting, cart recovery, email sequences—all lose relevance when the funnel collapses to one interaction.
Strategic Implications
For Brands:
Invest in entity authority. Your brand’s representation in AI training data, knowledge graphs, and third-party sources determines whether you get recommended. This means:
Active reputation management and review solicitation
Presence in authoritative sources the AI trusts
Clear differentiation that AI can articulate
Build for recommendation, not traffic. The goal isn’t “drive visitors to our site.” It’s “be the option the AI recommends.” This requires:
Understanding how AI agents evaluate and rank options
Optimizing for the factors that drive AI recommendations
Accepting that you may never see the “traffic”—just the transactions
For Marketers:
Unify your teams around agentic readiness. The old silos (brand vs. performance, SEO vs. paid, marketing vs. commerce) don’t map to the agentic funnel. You need:
Integrated teams that own “agentic presence” end-to-end
Shared metrics focused on recommendation rate and transaction completion
Combined investment in data infrastructure and brand authority
Rethink measurement. Traditional funnel metrics (impressions, clicks, sessions, bounce rate) become less relevant. New metrics include:
AI recommendation rate (how often are you in the top 3?)
Agentic conversion rate (when recommended, how often do users buy?)
Protocol transaction volume (how many purchases complete via AI checkout?)
Entity authority score (how does your brand rate in AI evaluations?)
For Technologists:
Structured data is the new SEO. Schema markup, JSON-LD, and standardized product feeds aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re essential infrastructure. Invest in:
Comprehensive schema coverage across all products
Real-time data feeds with hourly or faster updates
Protocol integration (ACP, UCP, MCP) for checkout capability
API infrastructure that AI agents can query directly
The Bottom Line
The agentic commerce funnel isn’t an optimization of the traditional funnel. It’s a replacement.
What collapses:
The stages (awareness, consideration, intent, purchase) merge into one interaction
The touchpoints (8-10 average) reduce to one
The timeline (days or weeks) compresses to minutes
New metrics: recommendation rate, agentic conversion, protocol volume
New investments: structured data, entity authority, protocol integration
New economics: platform fees replace advertising spend
The fundamental shift: In the old funnel, brands competed for attention at each stage. In the agentic funnel, brands compete for one thing: being the option the AI recommends when intent is expressed.
Everything else—the data infrastructure, the entity authority, the protocol integration—serves that single goal.
The funnel hasn’t been optimized. It’s been collapsed into a single moment of truth: Does the AI recommend you, and can the user buy?
Master that moment, and the rest follows. Miss it, and no amount of traditional funnel optimization will save you.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
