Google just announced brand agents. If you have any kind of business, it's really important that you understand what this is. This is Google's latest attempt to keep people from visiting your website.
That's right. Google does not want to send people to your website. It wants to keep them on Google search.
The more time people spend on Google, the more ads they click and the more money Google makes. Now I'm sure they also believe that it'll be a better user experience if users don't have to hop around from website to website and can just accomplish everything they need right on the search results page. And that very well might be true.
But let's be honest about the incentives here. So what is Brand Agent? Well, it's an agent that users can chat with directly in Google's search results that understands your brand and acts as a representative of it.
It's currently only available to retailers, but my guess is this is coming to service based businesses soon as well. Assuming you already have your products set up in Google Merchant Center, you might already have a brand agent in Google search results. To check, just Google your business name.
If you see a panel on the right side representing your business, look for a chat option. If you see that Brand Agent is already enabled for your brand, go ahead and chat with it and see if the information is accurate. If you don't see a Chat button, look for a claim, this brand button, that means your brand hasn't been claimed yet and you'll need to claim it.
If you don't see a knowledge panel for your brand on the right side of Google search, it means you'll need to build more authority in Google before it recognizes your brand. Currently, these brand agents are fairly simple. They're just using data from your website and product fee.
But pretty soon Google is going to start allowing you to provide all kinds of documentation to help train your brand agent, things like brand guidelines and sizing guides. To make sure your brand agent is set up correctly, you'll want to log into Google Merchant Center and then under the marketing tab, look for Brand Agent. 2026 will be the year of agentic commerce and there's gonna be big opportunities for early adopters.
Early adopters, for early adopters.
