Microsoft Builds Commercial Infrastructure for the Era of AI Agents

According to monitoring by Dongcha Beating, Tim Frank, Vice President of AI Monetization at Microsoft, announced a set of updates to the commercial infrastructure aimed at the ‘agentic web’, designed to ensure that publishers, merchants, and advertisers continue to be discovered, cited, and transacted in scenarios where AI agents make decisions on behalf of users. The core consists of three parts. First is the Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), which was first reported by Axios last year and is now being scaled up. PCM helps publishers receive compensation when their paid content is cited on AI platforms, covering non-free information such as map data, product catalogs, news, and health information. Copilot is the first demand-side participant, and Microsoft is negotiating access with other AI platforms. Unlike the one-time packaged payment RAG licensing agreements currently between publishers and AI platforms, PCM follows a continuous trading market approach. The second part is commercial agreement support. Microsoft has officially launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) data source in Merchant Center, an open standard developed by Google in collaboration with companies like Shopify, allowing AI agents to directly read structured product information. It also integrates Shopify’s Global Catalog into Copilot, enabling over 500,000 merchants’ products to be searched and transacted within Copilot. Microsoft claims that top Shopify merchants have seen a nearly 90% increase in exposure within Copilot after integration. Copilot Checkout has been extended to mobile and integrated into the membership systems of retailers like Target. The third part involves advertising and insights tools. The AI Visibility feature of Microsoft Clarity has been expanded, helping brands see how often their web pages are cited in AI responses, compare citations with competitors, and receive content gap suggestions. New offerings include AI Max search ads (in public beta since May), Offer Highlights (showcasing product selling points in Copilot conversations), and Audience generation (describing target audiences in natural language for AI to automatically generate audience targeting). Microsoft stated that it will not take transaction commissions, only charging a low technical service fee. Frank emphasized that the company has primarily focused on enterprise services for 51 years and does not have conflicts of interest as a platform competing with its customers.