Three Assistants, One Store
On June 18, Target laid out a claim that few retailers can match: it is the first mass merchant offering full shopping experiences across three leading AI platforms at once. Shoppers can now discover and buy Target products inside Google Search and the Gemini app, inside Microsoft Copilot and inside OpenAI's ChatGPT. This is not a chatbot bolted onto the website. It is the core shopping experience, browsing, multi-item baskets, loyalty and checkout, distributed into whichever assistant a customer already opens. In ChatGPT, that even extends to fresh food and to fulfillment choices like Drive Up, Order Pickup and shipping.
The strategic instinct here is worth naming. Rather than picking a single AI partner and hoping shoppers follow, Target is treating the assistants as interchangeable storefronts and making itself available on all of them. That hedges against the very real uncertainty about which agent wins consumer attention. It also quietly turns each platform into a competitor for Target's catalog, which is a healthier position for the retailer than being captive to one. For a company that has spent years building omnichannel muscle, adding conversational surfaces is a logical, if aggressive, next step.
A 2,000 Percent Signal
The number Target wants executives to remember is a 2,000 percent surge in AI-driven traffic in the first quarter, measured year over year. For context, the company pegs the increase across retail sites overall at roughly 400 percent. Even allowing for the fact that these gains start from a tiny base, a five-fold outperformance against the sector is not noise. It suggests Target's early presence on these platforms is compounding, and that shoppers who start a task in an assistant are increasingly willing to finish it there rather than bouncing to a browser tab.
We would caution against reading 2,000 percent as evidence that agentic commerce has arrived at scale. Percentage growth off a small base is the easiest statistic in retail to inflate, and Target has not disclosed the absolute revenue involved. The more durable insight is directional: AI-referred visits are growing far faster than any other acquisition channel, and they behave differently, arriving with intent and a task already half-formed. That is exactly the kind of traffic a retailer should want to capture early, before the cost of appearing in these environments starts to rise.
Loyalty Is the Real Prize
The detail that separates Target's approach from a simple product feed is loyalty linking. Across the platforms, shoppers can connect their Target Circle accounts, which means the retailer can carry personalization, offers and purchase history into the conversation rather than treating each interaction as anonymous. In Copilot specifically, account linking unlocks loyalty benefits and checkout inside the chat. This is how Target avoids the trap that worries every retailer about agentic commerce: becoming a commoditized supplier whose only differentiator is price, ranked by someone else's algorithm.
Owning the loyalty relationship inside a third-party assistant is a subtle but important form of leverage. If a shopper's Target Circle identity travels with them into Gemini or ChatGPT, Target keeps the first-party data, the offer targeting and the reason for the customer to prefer its listing over a generic match. The retailers that lose in agentic commerce will be the ones that hand over their catalog and get back nothing but transactions. Target is clearly trying to make sure the customer relationship, not just the sale, comes home with it.
The Protocol Underneath
None of this works without plumbing, and Target co-developed the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google and other partners to provide it. UCP is the open standard that lets AI agents create shopping journeys that cross retailer systems, from discovery to basket to checkout, without every platform needing a bespoke integration. Ashish Gupta, vice president and general manager of merchant shopping at Google, framed the collaboration bluntly, saying that working with leaders like Target is critical to scaling agentic commerce in a way that benefits both consumers and retailers. Standards, not features, are what make this durable.
For enterprise buyers, the protocol story is the part to watch. A retailer that builds to an open standard once can, in principle, appear across any compliant assistant without re-engineering for each one. That is the same logic Salesforce is pursuing with its catalog sync, and it points to a market that is consolidating around a small number of interoperability layers. The risk is that these standards are being shaped by the platform giants themselves, which means retailers should participate actively rather than simply consume whatever specification Google and its peers hand down.
What Target Executives Are Saying
Sarah Travis, Target's chief digital and revenue officer, put the rationale plainly: more people are discovering products in AI-powered environments, and the company sees an opportunity to meet them on that journey rather than wait for them to arrive at Target.com. Prat Vemana, chief information and product officer, added that consumers are shopping more conversationally and that Target intends to help shape where those experiences go. That last phrase is the ambition worth noting. Target is not positioning itself as a passive participant but as a retailer trying to influence the design of the channel itself.
Our read is that Target has correctly identified conversational AI as a distribution channel that now needs owners, budgets and measurement, not a lab project. The 2,000 percent figure will fade as the base grows, but the structural bet is sound: shoppers are starting more journeys inside assistants, and the retailers who are already transactable there, with loyalty attached, will compound an advantage. The harder work begins now, in attribution and margin. Appearing in three assistants is table stakes. Proving that agentic traffic is incremental, and profitable, is the metric that will decide whether this becomes a channel or a cost.
