Amazon made two things plain in its earnings call last night: 1) It expects its on-site agent, Alexa for Shopping, to be "the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon," meaning it seems unlikely to meaningfully open its catalog to third-party agents for agentic shopping tasks, and 2) Alexa for Shopping has seen significant adoption by Amazon customers, with over 400MM customers having used it in the trailing 12 months. To my mind, the notion that (third-party) Agentic Commerce is a Mirage has already been demonstrated. For instance, Tony Xu noted in the DoorDash call this week that third-party agents had completed "several hundred orders in total" on its platform. There is no "there" there with Agentic Commerce; platforms have an inherent, insurmountable data and capabilities advantage with shopping tasks and their own agents will outperform the third-party agents that are even given access. And those third-party agents are increasingly starved of access. Walmart recently published its Agentic Access Terms, and the company forces third-party agents through Sparky for autonomous checkout, meaning they effectively just remit Sparky output. Jassy noted on the Amazon call that the company does "anticipate working with horizontal agents," but my sense is this will look either like *advertising* deals (Amazon struck such a deal with ChatGPT last month) or Walmart's access terms, broadcasting Alexa for Shopping into third-party surfaces. I've seen analysis attributing the deceleration in Amazon's advertising business (26% in Q2 to 11% in Q3) to third-party agentic commerce. This is absurd on its face. First, Jassy said as much on the call. Second, Amazon *blocks* external agents, so by definition, endemic brands would not see their ad spend displaced by third-party agentic discovery. And third, and most importantly: Prime Day moved from Q3 to Q2 in 2026. Third-party agents will fulfill the discovery role in commerce, which means that advertising is the most natural business model for them. Everything is an ad network.

@flyrodcapital My guess is that $GOOGL continues to experiment with ad load and placement in AI Overviews / AI Mode user journeys, optimizing for long-term retention. It's a difficult task. Also, Q3 2025 wasn't an easy comp.

Anecdotes and personal experiences can be useful tools for understanding the utility of products for specific use cases, but I think it’s a mistake to use such a narrowly-scoped instrument to try to explain the business models of trillion-dollar companies — and, more contemporaneously, why they’ll be utterly disrupted by AI. Certainly this is true for a company like Google $GOOGL, as the mechanics of digital advertising are more complex than they might appear when looking at the results for any given query. The notion that Search merely, exclusively monetizes the results that would have otherwise been exposed organically, almost like a protection racket, is flawed. Search ads offer keyword adjacency / expansion tools, and shopping journeys start long before a consumer knows exactly which product they want to buy. Further, marketing teams can test their spend for revenue incrementality; doing so with Google Search is straightforward. Certainly some Search ad spend is wasted but that’s true for every ad channel. “Google Search dies because of Muse” ignores the incremental product discovery value of search advertising, the fact that Google has launched its own AI products that currently reach in aggregate billions of people per month (AI Overviews: 2.5BN, AI Mode: 1BN), the fact that Google owns the most popular browser, the fact that Google operates a mobile platform, and the fact that Google operates a suite of consumer products that are all deeply integrated. And in the context of this specific argument, it also ignores the fact that Muse will need to generate meaningful revenue at scale and will almost certainly do so with advertising. In some ways, Google Search has already died (and been resurrected in a different form). This is the premise of my Google’s Gambit series, which I started publishing long before Muse. The company is adapting in real time to new consumer interaction models. If consumers find agents useful for product discovery, there is no reason to believe that Google *can’t* accommodate that. But to reduce a ~$250BN annualized business to a consumer- and advertiser-hostile protection racket, and then assume that Google cannot adapt its distribution and monetization machinery to an agentic consumer workflow (which it already partially has, through Universal Commerce Protocol, Universal Cart, agentic checkout, etc.), is, in my view, overly simplistic and naïve.

My fav sharding lore is that the term likely comes from an evil wizard. Ultima Online was growing so fast in 1996 that they had to spread players across separate servers. They wanted it to make sense in the story, so the designer dug through the original Ultima games from the 80s. At the end of Ultima I, a wizard traps the world in a crystal that gets shattered. So the story is that each "shard" holds a copy of the world.

Agentic commerce is a mirage (part 3) "Walmart’s quarterly earnings crystallize the distinction at the heart of this series. Shopping agents may only be viable, for a number of reasons, when they are controlled by retailers and integrated into their commerce stacks. Agentic commerce is not disappearing, and, in fact, it has already demonstrated material commercial traction; it is simply being activated and absorbed by the retail platforms whose catalogs, customer data, recommendation systems, advertising businesses, and fulfillment infrastructure make it useful, rather than by independent agents."

I'm in the midst of a cross-country move, so I wasn't able to watch this interview when it was published. I finally found the time for it this weekend, and it is truly phenomenal. Genuinely a tour de force of insight. I haven't encountered a more information-dense video in recent memory. It also crystallizes Ben's role as the transcendent, towering technology analyst. I contend that no other person on Earth could go as deep across such a broad set of topics. He is an N of 1.

Tomorrow, I'm interviewing everyone's favorite app marketing consultant, @Thomasbcn, for the next installment of the MDM Mailbag. Submit your questions for Thomas here:

Today would be a great day for someone to debunk the persistent myths about Apple Pay privacy! The topic deserves a full post, but here are two massive caveats to how Apple Pay’s privacy benefits are commonly described: 1. Apple Pay is pseudonymous, not anonymous. It uses a stable token for each card on each device. If a merchant links that token to your identity (through a loyalty card, email receipt, shipping address, etc.), it can identify your past and future purchases with that merchant whenever you use the same token. 2. Some of that pseudonymity has since been undermined by the payments industry with Payment Account Reference (PAR). It’s a stable, non-payment identifier that allows participating merchants and processors to recognize the same underlying card account across its physical card and associated Apple Pay tokens.

As always, it was fantastic to join Ben Thompson on the @stratechery podcast. We discussed the generative revolution in digital advertising, Meta’s communications challenges, the evolution of Google Search, Apple, AppLovin, and the components of a Prosperous Society.