Wildcard Helps Ecommerce and Retail Brands Win in the Agentic Commerce Era

A new layer of commerce is forming inside AI assistants, and most brands cannot yet see what is happening inside it. When a shopper asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or another AI assistant to recommend running shoes, protein powder, office supplies, or a lightweight laptop, an entirely new buying journey unfolds. It is not a search results page, a social feed, or a traditional marketplace. It is a conversational shopping surface where products are discovered, compared, cited, recommended, and increasingly purchased.

Wildcard, a Y Combinator Winter 2025 company, is the command center for this new era of agentic commerce.

Founded by Kaushik Mahorker, Wildcard helps ecommerce and retail brands, and the agencies that support them, understand, improve, and monetize how products show up across AI shopping agents. The platform gives teams visibility into where products appear, where competitors are winning, which prompts and questions matter, which sources influence AI recommendations, and what actions they can take to improve performance.

Unlike generic AI visibility tools, Wildcard is built specifically for commerce. The platform connects AI search visibility to the surfaces ecommerce teams can actually change: product pages, collection pages, blogs, structured data, product attributes, off-site citations, Reddit discussions, YouTube mentions, outreach opportunities, and Shopify revenue attribution. Instead of only showing brands that they are missing from AI answers, Wildcard turns those gaps into concrete recommendations and workflows.

The company’s core belief is simple: the next decade of ecommerce will not be defined only by Google rankings, paid search, or social ads. AI assistants are becoming a new shopping interface. Consumers are already asking AI systems what to buy, which brands to trust, and which products best fit their needs. As these assistants evolve into agents that can research, compare, recommend, and transact, brands need a new operating system for managing their presence across those surfaces.

Wildcard is that operating system.

Today, the platform helps brands and agencies monitor AI visibility, track prompts and competitors, identify opportunities, execute optimizations, and measure impact. For Shopify brands, Wildcard connects directly into the store to support product and content workflows. For agencies, Wildcard creates a commerce-native layer for helping clients understand and act on AI shopping visibility. For larger retailers, marketplaces, and non-Shopify brands, the platform provides visibility, recommendations, and guided optimization paths across their commerce footprint.

Wildcard also helps brands prepare for the next phase of agentic commerce. As protocols like ACP and UCP shape how AI agents discover products, exchange product data, and complete transactions, brands need infrastructure that helps them adapt to those new buying flows. Wildcard helps forward-looking ecommerce teams, retailers, and agencies push the frontier of agentic commerce while improving performance in today’s AI shopping surfaces.

The opportunity is significant. The shift from ranked links to conversational recommendations changes how products are discovered and chosen. A brand may have strong SEO, strong paid acquisition, and strong marketplace presence, yet still be invisible when a customer asks an AI assistant what to buy. That invisibility becomes increasingly expensive as AI shopping becomes a larger part of consumer research and purchase behavior.

Wildcard gives ecommerce teams and their agencies a way to participate intentionally. It turns agentic commerce from a black box into a measurable, optimizable channel, one that brands can manage with the same rigor they bring to SEO, paid search, lifecycle marketing, and conversion optimization.

Wildcard is the command center for agentic commerce. Ecommerce and retail brands, along with the agencies that support them, use Wildcard to understand how AI agents see their products, improve how those products are recommended, prepare for emerging protocols like ACP and UCP, and connect AI shopping visibility back to revenue.