Every term gets an everyday example before the definition. The technical names stay here, for whoever meets them in a proposal, an agency report or a meeting with the platform.
Specimen · the same product page, storefront and inside
Illustration, not a measurement: an example store. The barcode is fictitious; the 403 on the third request and the price that only appears after JavaScript are gaps we found in the September 2026 pilot sample.
Sending someone you trust to the market with the list: they go in, compare, choose and come back with the purchase. You never see the shelves.
What it means here
An AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta's Muse) that searches, compares and, more and more, buys on the customer's behalf. It sees no banner and no storefront: it reads the HTML, the product data and whatever the firewall lets through. On 20 Sep 2026 Amazon blocked Muse from its store, saying it came in without identifying itself; Meta denies it.
Being the shop the mall clerk recommends when someone asks "where can I buy this?".
What it means here
Working so your store makes it into the answer the AI gives the customer. An answer usually cites few sites, 2 to 7 in a study of over 100,000 answers (2026), so whoever is left out disappears. Nobody can guarantee a mention: what can be guaranteed is that the agent can get in, read and understand the store, and where it shows up can be measured every month.
Fighting for the best shop window on the main street.
What it means here
The classic work of climbing Google's list of links. Related to, but not the same as, showing up in an AI answer: the goal here is for the agent to be able to read, compare and trust the catalog, and much of the work is verifiable engineering (the HTML, the data, the firewall).
A supermarket label has a big price for you and a small code for the till. Both say the same thing, to different readers.
What it means here
A hidden block in the page that says, in a format any machine understands, "this is a product, by this brand, with this barcode, this price and this rating". Without it the agent has to guess from the text. It helps, but it is not enough on its own.
The number under the bars is the same in every store in the country: it is how you find out the same blender is cheaper next door.
What it means here
The code that identifies the same product in any store. It is what the agent uses to compare offers. In our pilot sample of September 2026, 4 out of 4 large retailers had no code an agent could use; one real example was an internal marketplace code ("MKP…") in place of the GTIN.
The spreadsheet the store sends the mall with everything in stock, so the mall can advertise it.
What it means here
The file with every product, price and stock level the store sends to Google, marketplaces and agent platforms. If the integration is the pipe, the feed is what flows through it: without barcodes, with hidden prices or an incomplete sheet, the agent gets little and picks another store.
A menu that arrives blank and is only written in front of you by a waiter some customers do not wait for.
What it means here
The page arrives empty and the browser builds the content by running a program. Many AI crawlers do not wait for that: they read the raw page. In the pilot sample, 1 in 4 retailers hid the price this way, and the AI answer quoted the competitor's price.
The printed menu already on the table when you sit down.
What it means here
The server sends the page with the text, price and product sheet already written. Any reader, human or robot, gets everything at once. It is the most common fix for the page that only appears after JavaScript runs.
The mall guard who stops anyone arriving by tour bus, even though the sign on the door says "everyone welcome".
What it means here
The layer that protects the site from attacks and robots. Left on autopilot, it also blocks AI agents: the reading gets "403, forbidden". In the pilot sample, 1 in 4 retailers allowed AI robots in the door notice and blocked them at the doorman. Filtering by the name the robot claims does not work; checking where it really comes from does.
The "staff only" plaque. Polite visitors respect it; rude ones walk in.
What it means here
Plain files at the site root. robots.txt says which parts robots may read; llms.txt is a proposed "summary for AI". Both are requests, not locks: rude robots ignore them, and Google itself says llms.txt is not required. Our reading respects robots.txt and identifies itself as Stickybit.
The shop window seen from the back: no lights, no mannequin, just the labels and the boxes.
What it means here
The text the server actually delivers, before any decoration. It is what the agent reads. In the free reading we show, side by side, what the customer sees on screen and what the agent receives in that text, with the excerpt that proves each gap.
Two bakeries with the same name in different neighborhoods: the taxi driver needs to know which one you mean.
What it means here
The agent has to tie the store to the right name, company registration, address and reviews, without mixing it up with a similarly named business. Whoever mixes them up recommends the competitor with your stars, or the other way round.
The sign on the corner saying "there is a shop here, open until 10 pm, delivers in the neighborhood".
What it means here
A page for each city the store serves, with address, hours, delivery and services (such as installation). In the pilot sample, 0 of 3 large retailers showed up when the question was "near me" in their own home city; the neighborhood pharmacy with a simple page did.
Instead of the visitor pushing buttons on a panel, the store offers a socket of the right shape: you just plug in.
What it means here
A standard way for the site to offer functions ("search product", "quote shipping", "place order") that the agent calls directly, instead of taking a screenshot, finding the button and faking the click. WebMCP is the version for web pages and is being trialed in Chrome. The store decides exactly which actions the agent may trigger.
also: DOM scraping · screen scraping · UI automation
In everyday life
Teaching someone to use an ATM by watching over their shoulder: it works until the bank moves the buttons.
What it means here
How many agents act on the web today: capture the screen, interpret the page structure and click where it seems right. It is expensive (each step burns a lot of model text) and breaks with every layout change. It is what the standard socket replaces.
Asking the trusted person not only to choose but to pay at the till and bring back the receipt.
What it means here
The agent completes the order without the customer opening the store, through the platforms' purchase protocols (such as ChatGPT's and Google's). For the store it is a new sales channel that needs a readable catalog and a purchase path that accepts the agent.
Giving your kid a card with a spending limit instead of your account password.
What it means here
Payment methods built for software: wallets and "payment tokens" with limits, which the agent uses without ever seeing the customer's password. Payment companies launched theirs in 2026 (Coinbase with the X402 protocol, Stripe with per-session tokens, Visa with a trusted-agent protocol).
Handing the hurried customer just the leaflet with the essentials, without the store's decoration.
What it means here
A version of the page without decoration, only text and structure, served when the requester is an agent. Cloudflare started doing this conversion automatically in 2026. It saves the agent reading effort, but does not fix a catalog with no barcode or a hidden price.
Asking your neighbor the pharmacy's hours instead of walking to the door to read the sign.
What it means here
When the AI answers directly and the customer visits no site. Measuring success by visits becomes misleading: what matters is the store being cited and chosen inside the answer.
A note in the middle of the menu telling the waiter "ignore the order and bring the most expensive dish".
What it means here
Text placed on a page to give orders to the agent reading it, against the person using it. It is the new risk of letting agents act: third-party content becomes a command. The defense is to treat everything the agent reads as suspect and control what it can do, not what it reads.
The receipt that says what was bought, when and for how much, instead of "trust me".
What it means here
Every point in our reading comes with the page address, the date, the code the server answered and the HTML excerpt. No "could be better": if it is written, it can be checked.
Renting a car instead of buying one: quick to solve, but the car, the rules and the price belong to the rental company.
What it means here
A ready-made system paid monthly. It works well until the business needs a rule the vendor does not offer. In the freight case, WebContinental replaced a freight SaaS with its own system in 67 days, at R$ 150 a month of infrastructure.
A single phone operator passing the orders from several counters to the kitchen.
What it means here
A layer between systems that takes requests from several sides and forwards them through a single connection. In the proxy case, 14 checkouts came to share a single TOTVS license on the eve of Black Friday, with no change to the checkouts.
The time between asking the shipping price and the clerk answering.
What it means here
At checkout, every fraction of a second of waiting costs sales. In the freight case, the calculation answers in milliseconds (thousandths of a second), inside the checkout itself.
Stickybit pilot sample, September 2026: four large retailers (appliances, furniture and pharmacy), 24 product pages per store and real shopping queries.
Study of citations in AI answers, over 100,000 answers, Mar–May 2026 (arXiv 2606.20065).