Deloitte Digital estimates AI agents could influence almost $1 trillion in annual consumer spending in Australia.
By Malin Gaertig · August 3, 2026
Poor machine readability is one of the biggest risks organisations are underestimating. I tested 11 retailers — 60% never got an AI agent to a real product page.
- —Deloitte estimates AI agents could influence almost $1 trillion in annual Australian consumer spending — but poor machine readability is the biggest underestimated risk.
- —Across 11 retailers tested, 60% of agent product searches never reached a real product page — the agent fills the gap with guesses, competitors, or 'doesn't exist'.
- —The fix is basic site hygiene: audit agent reachability, check what agents find when they can't reach you, and treat machine readability as critical infrastructure.
Deloitte Digital estimates AI agents could influence almost $1 trillion in annual consumer spending in Australia.
According to Deloitte, poor machine readability is one of the biggest risks organisations are underestimating.
I tested this directly. Across 11 retailers, I tried to replicate the agent experience of searching for a product.
60% never got there!
The reasons varied, but came down to the same thing: insufficient infrastructure, the plumbing underneath the site.
If an AI agent can't be reliably routed to a real product page, it stops mattering how capable it is once it arrives, because most of the time it never arrives. It fills the gap instead: general brand knowledge, a guessed price, a competitor's listing, occasionally a flat statement the product doesn't exist. Not because the model gave up. Because there was nothing there to find.
Even where a product was reachable, the answers weren't consistently reliable. A second problem, sitting on a much bigger one.
The fix isn't sophisticated and that's the uncomfortable part. It's basic site hygiene, the kind most retailers would say they already have. Nobody's actually checked.
For a board, this is bigger than any AI roadmap item. Agentic shopping is arriving on top of the retail estate you already have, not one you get to design from scratch. If the foundation can't route a request to a real page 6 times out of 10 that's a gap likely costing sales on a fast-growing channel.
Where to start:
Audit whether product pages are reachable by an AI agent, not just indexable by a search engine
Check what an agent finds when it can't reach you
Treat machine readability as critical infrastructure
This is the gap MARK was built to close: seeing how your brand shows up to AI agents, before it costs you the sale.