Microsoft Building the Business Transaction Infrastructure for the AI Era

According to Perceiving One Beating's monitoring, Microsoft's AI Monetization Vice President Tim Frank announced a set of updates to the "Agentic Web" commercial infrastructure, aiming to enable publishers, merchants, and advertisers to continue to be discovered, referenced, and transacted in scenarios where AI agents make decisions on behalf of users.

The core is divided into three parts. The first is the Publisher Content Marketplace (PCM), first reported by Axios last year and now expanding in scale. The PCM helps publishers receive compensation on the AI platform when their paid content is referenced, covering data maps, product catalogs, news, health information, and other non-free information. Copilot is the first demand partner to integrate, and Microsoft is in negotiations with other AI platforms for integration. Unlike the one-time bundled payment RAG licensing agreements between current publishers and AI platforms, PCM adopts a continuous transactional market-driven approach.

The second part is Business Agreement Support. Microsoft has officially launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) data source in the Merchant Center, an open standard developed by Google in collaboration with companies like Shopify, enabling AI agents to directly read structured product information. Additionally, Shopify's Global Catalog is integrated into Copilot, allowing products from over 500,000 merchants to be searched and transacted within Copilot. Microsoft stated that exposure for top Shopify merchants in Copilot increased by approximately 90% after integration. Copilot Checkout has expanded to mobile and integrated with retail partners like Target's membership system.

The third part focuses on advertising and insight tools. Microsoft Clarity's AI Visibility feature has been expanded to assist brands in seeing the frequency of their website being referenced in AI answers, comparing competitor references, and receiving content gap suggestions. New launches include AI Max Search Ads (in beta since May), Offer Highlights (displaying product highlights in Copilot conversations), and Audience Generation (describing target audiences in natural language for AI-generated audience targeting).

Microsoft stated that it will not charge transaction commissions, only a technical service fee, with rates remaining low. Frank stated that the company has primarily focused on enterprise services for 51 years and has no conflict of interest in competing with customers as a platform.