Market2026-08-09 · 11 min read
Agentic Commerce in Industrial Supply: 2026 Reality
What actually works in agentic commerce today versus the hype — and why the Instant Checkout retreat proved accuracy, not autonomy, is the bottleneck.
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Field notes
How machines read
product data
Research, technical guides and market analysis on the shift from human catalogs to machine-readable product data — written for the people who build and sell components.
MarketTechnicalComplianceSolution
Technical2026-08-09 · 9 min read
AI Crawlers Do Not Run JavaScript
GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot read raw HTML and never execute scripts. How to test whether your catalog is visible, and fix it without a rewrite.
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Compliance2026-08-09 · 11 min read
Digital Product Passports and Machine-Readable Data
What the EU Digital Product Passport actually mandates, the confirmed dates, how ETIM, ECLASS, AAS and GS1 fit, and why the same asset serves AI agents.
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Market2026-08-09 · 12 min read
How AI Specification Changed B2B Buying
Engineers and buyers now ask an assistant before they touch a supplier site. What that does to spec-in, design registration and distributor demand creation.
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Market2026-08-09 · 12 min read
How Engineers Select Components With AI in 2026
AI-assisted part selection is now near-universal, but engineers still verify against datasheets. What manufacturers must publish to be trusted in that loop.
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Technical2026-08-09 · 11 min read
MCP for Manufacturers: A Practical Guide
What the Model Context Protocol is, what a parts MCP server should expose, how OAuth gates price and stock, and which assistants can actually reach it.
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Solution2026-08-09 · 11 min read
robots.txt for AI Crawlers: The 2026 Guide
Every AI user-agent that matters in 2026, who runs it, which honour robots.txt, copy-pasteable configs, WAF allowlisting and how to verify it from your logs.
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Market2026-08-09 · 11 min read
The Agentic Web and Industrial Product Data
The web is splitting into a human surface and a machine surface. Crawl-vs-refer economics, Cloudflare's toll gates, signed agents, and what to do about it.
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Solution2026-08-09 · 10 min read
What Is an Agent-Ready Product Catalog?
An agent-ready catalog serves four machine surfaces. Here is what each one is, which AI assistants actually consume it, and how to tell your level.
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Technical2026-08-09 · 9 min read
Why AI Cannot Read Your Datasheets
Bot walls, image-only scans, viewer-only documents and separate doc hosts make datasheets invisible to AI. Test yours in three commands, then fix them.
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See it on your own catalog
Reading about it is one thing. Run the free grader and see exactly what AI can and cannot read of your products today — crawler policy, catalog coverage, datasheet access, scored and benchmarked.
Grade my catalog