Zero-Click Commerce and the Rise of Buying Agents: A conversation with Kevin Williams

In this episode, host Damien Filiatrault talks with Kevin Williams, founder of Ascend AI, about what “agentic commerce” actually means as shopping and discovery start shifting into ChatGPT- and Gemini-style interfaces. They break down the path from today’s LLM-assisted recommendations to “zero-click” transactions that happen entirely inside an AI chat, without users ever visiting a traditional checkout flow. Kevin explains why brands are seeing meaningful declines in organic traffic, why being discoverable now requires a mix of AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization), and how those strategies extend beyond your website into reviews, sentiment, and the broader web. They also dig into the messy reality of emerging standards (product feeds, schema, and competing protocols) and what builders may actually need to implement to make products legible and purchasable by agents. If you’re building for e-commerce, marketing, or the next web experience, this episode offers a practical look at what’s changing, what’s still unsettled, and how to prepare before “zero-click” becomes the default.

Host Damien Filiatrault sits down with Kevin Williams, founder of Ascend AI, to map the fast-shifting terrain of agentic commerce—the move from “LLMs that recommend” to systems that can discover, compare, and eventually complete purchases with minimal human clicking. Drawing on his background building direct-to-consumer brands and solving post–iOS 14 attribution gaps with machine learning, Kevin explains why “zero-click commerce” is coming, why brands are already seeing meaningful drops in organic traffic, and what they can do to stay discoverable as shopping flows migrate into ChatGPT/Gemini-style interfaces.

Kevin breaks the space into two big layers: being found (AEO/GEO) and being transactable (a growing soup of protocols, feeds, and enrichment standards). He walks through how Google’s ecosystem is evolving via Merchant Center feed enrichment, why OpenAI and Google are unlikely to converge quickly on a single standard, and why most non-Shopify brands may need to support multiple feeds/endpoints in the near term. The conversation also digs into what this shift means for marketers: fewer familiar on-site analytics signals, more “share of voice” style measurement, and a future where prompt-level attribution becomes the new battleground.

What you’ll learn

What “agentic commerce” means today vs. what it implies next: LLM-assisted discovery now, agent-assisted purchasing later (especially in B2B replenishment and procurement workflows).
Why zero-click commerce changes the operational burden for merchants: identity, payment security, and fulfillment still have to happen—just without a traditional checkout flow.
The difference between AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and why GEO increasingly depends on broader web presence—reviews, sentiment, and third-party references—not just on-site content.
Why the web-as-screenshots approach (agentic browsers) is clunky and expensive, and why platforms are pushing toward structured data feeds and “traction points” that models can reliably consume.
How Google’s approach leans on Merchant Center product feeds with new enrichment fields, and why populating those fields (sentiment/occasion/recipient) becomes a real scaling challenge for large catalogs.
Why there’s no “one feed to rule them all” yet—and why competing incentives (ads, attribution, control) make standardization hard in the short term.
What this shift does to analytics: less time-on-site and scroll depth, more reliance on referral signals, model “share of voice” tracking, and paid-placement pressure.
Who adopts fastest: brands closest to the traffic cliff (digitally native, younger-skewing audiences) vs. segments that haven’t felt the drop as sharply.

Memorable sound bites

“Zero-click commerce means the entire transaction happens in the LLM.”
“We have to clarify the matrix for the model so it’s not guessing from screenshots.”
“AEO is relatively straightforward. GEO is the bigger lift.”
“There is no one feed to rule them all yet.”
“It’s going to be really rough” (for traditional analytics in a world where fewer humans visit your site).

Tune in for a practical, acronym-heavy (but real-world grounded) tour of what commerce looks like when discovery and conversion start moving inside LLMs—and what builders and brands can do now to avoid getting buried as the interfaces change.

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