Between 1 July and 17 August this year, ChatGPT pointed at a pricing page in 0.88% of its citations8 when it answered a question in the software categories we track. Google AI Mode managed 0.09%.8
ChatGPT can now complete a purchase without leaving the chat. Google has published the standard meant to do the same, and both card networks have shipped rails for it.
The page a buyer would have to act on is almost never the page either engine cites. That gap is the whole subject: agentic commerce gets discussed as a payments problem, and for a software company it is a visibility problem wearing a payments costume.
Highlights
Read together those say something narrower than the headlines and more useful. The transaction layer is real, dated and shipping.
The demand is real and growing fastest somewhere other than software. And what stands between a software company and an agent that could buy from it is not a checkout integration: it is that the engines have almost nothing of yours to hand over.
The Rails Are Built, And Nobody Has Published A Usage Rate
The disclosures are easy to line up, because every one of them is dated and on the record.
Notice what none of them contains. Not one publishes a usage rate, a transaction count, or any measure of how much is being bought this way.
They tell you the rails exist. They do not tell you there is traffic on them, and the companies that would know are the ones staying quiet.
Visa’s is the one worth reading twice. Agent Score, in Visa’s words, allows merchants “to evaluate their websites for agentic commerce readiness”, by testing “whether AI agents can navigate, understand and complete tasks on a merchant’s website”.4
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The Traffic Is Real, And Software Is In The Slow Lane
Adobe measures this across more than a trillion visits to US retail sites, which makes it the largest published count of what generative AI is sending anywhere.
Tech and software is fourth of the five, ahead of only media and entertainment. That is the number a software marketing leader should sit with, because it cuts both ways: the wave is real, and it reached your category late and small.
The quality half is better news, and it is also retail’s. People who arrive from an engine arrive further along, because the engine already did the narrowing.
People Delegate The Shortlist Long Before They Delegate The Card
The consumer research is consistent to the point of being boring, which is usually how you know it is measuring something.
The conditions people attach are the interesting part, and they are not soft.
Put those beside where a shopping journey starts today and the sequence is clear enough.
The step people are handing over first is the choosing.
The paying comes later, hedged with approvals, and for a software buyer it may never arrive in the form the announcements imagine.
What The Engines Cite When Somebody Asks About Software
We count this in Qvery, our sister company, which measures brand visibility across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode and captures every citation behind every answer. Read the numbers below knowing we own the instrument.
Qvery counted every citation in every answer across fourteen tracked software categories between 1 July and 17 August 2026, and classified each cited URL by the kind of page it is.
At the level a reader experiences, the same run says 6.9% of ChatGPT’s answers and 1.1% of Google AI Mode’s cite at least one page a buyer could act on, over 50,744 and 52,863 answers.8
Turn those around and they are the finding. 93% and 99% of answers about software carry nothing buyable at all.
An agent cannot buy from a page no engine ever cites.
What fills the space instead is somebody else’s page. A ranked list on a publication neither engine owns is the single most cited thing Google AI Mode reaches for in these categories, and it is where the shortlist an agent would inherit gets assembled.
Two checks before anyone quotes that at a board
The pooled figure is a middle and not a rule.
Thirteen of the fourteen categories run the same direction, with the two engines level in the fourteenth.8
And this is not a software problem. In a separate sweep across nine industries in April, buyable pages were under 1% of citations in eight of the nine, on both engines.9 Healthcare was the exception. Travel, finance, ecommerce and the rest sat in the same near-zero band.
Two Engines, Two Shelves, And What That Decides
The two engines are not reading the same internet. In Qvery’s own collection across 108 US product recommendation queries, their leading source lists overlap by 37.5%.10
Our software cut says the same thing from the other side. The documentation ChatGPT leans on barely registers for Google AI Mode, and the guides Google AI Mode leans on are a thinner slice of ChatGPT’s.
Whether ChatGPT and Google AI Mode name you is close to two separate questions, which is why the work is planned per engine rather than once.
Getting named on those third-party pages is one of the six workstreams we run at Empact Partners. We call it Generative Engine Optimization, and it runs as UGC plus mentions: what real users say in public, plus what independent pages say.
The order matters: read your own pages, then the pages somebody else owns, then spend the quarter on the second list.
An engagement opens with an audit of which of your own pages an engine can quote cleanly, then the list of third-party pages it already cites in your category, then the slow half we call Existing Article Outreach: taking the articles an engine already quotes and getting your product into them.
What None Of This Settles
No origin anywhere publishes how many software purchases an AI agent has completed, and neither do we.
Treat anybody’s month-over-month chart of AI citations with the suspicion it has earned, ours included.
Watch one number instead, this quarter: the share of answers in your category that name you at all. While that reads near zero, a checkout integration buys you nothing, because the agent that might use it will never be handed your page.
Watch the share of answers that name you at all. Everything else is downstream of it.
When it moves, the buyable pages are worth making legible, and Visa has already published what a machine is going to try to do on them.4
If you need help, or you would like to work with us, book a meeting with me and let us see if we could help you grow your visibility in AI search.
Sources
- Adobe, “AI-driven traffic surges across industries with retail experiencing biggest gains”, 2026. Adobe Analytics, measured across more than a trillion visits to US retail sites, November to December 2025, with a companion survey of more than 1,000 US respondents. Read 19 September 2026.
- OpenAI, “Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol”, 2025. Read 19 September 2026.
- Google, “New tech and tools for retailers to succeed in an agentic shopping era”, 2026. Read 19 September 2026.
- Visa, “Visa Announces New AI, Stablecoin and Token Innovations to Power Intelligent, Programmable Commerce at Visa Payments Forum”, 2026. Read 19 September 2026.
- Mastercard, “Mastercard unveils Agent Pay, pioneering agentic payments technology to power commerce in the age of AI”, 2025. Read 19 September 2026.
- Radial, “Radial Survey Finds 58% of Consumers Are Open to Using an AI Agent, Yet Only 6% Have Done So”, 2026. Two surveys conducted by Dynata, 1,000 US consumers aged 18 and over in each, fielded December 2025 and January 2026. Read 19 September 2026.
- Accenture, “Talk to my AI agent: The new rules of brand value”, 2026. Survey of 25,590 people across 16 countries. Read 19 September 2026.
- Qvery, the software-category run for this article. Every citation in every ChatGPT and Google AI Mode answer across fourteen tracked software categories, 1 July to 17 August 2026: 793,054 and 736,409 citations over 50,744 and 52,863 answers. Each cited URL classified by page type, from its tag and its path. Counted 19 September 2026.
- Qvery, the nine-industry sweep. Every citation in every ChatGPT and Google AI Mode answer across nine benchmark industry categories, 10 April to 4 May 2026, between 3,700 and 35,300 citations per industry and engine. Counted 19 September 2026.
- Qvery, “ChatGPT And Google AI Mode Cite Different Shopping Sources”, 2026. 108 US product recommendation queries across six retail categories, each run three times on ChatGPT and once on Google AI Mode, August 2026. Read 19 September 2026.
