Mondelez Agentic Commerce Strategy: 10% to 70% AI Visibility

Mondelez, the company behind Oreo and Cadbury, discovered that Oreo appeared in only 10% of AI chatbot cookie recommendations. The reason: they had AI bot crawlers blocked. Since unblocking them and rebuilding their sites for AI readability, Oreo now appears in 70% of cookie-specific AI queries.

Andrew Lederman, VP of Global Digital Commerce at Mondelez, shared the strategy shift at a Digiday event on April 7, 2026. The company’s digital commerce business exceeds $3.5 billion, and their retail partners expect 30% of site traffic to come from AI agents by 2028. That forced Mondelez to stop debating whether agentic commerce would happen and start preparing for it.

What Mondelez Changed

The overhaul focused on making brand websites readable by AI systems. That meant clean sitemaps, proper robots.txt files, fast load times, and machine-readable content structures. As Lederman put it, “if they can’t crawl our site, nothing else matters.”

Mondelez also built a measurement system to treat AI visibility as a performance marketing channel, tracking three KPIs: visibility (does the brand appear in AI responses?), citation (is the brand named and linked?), and sentiment (how is the brand described?). Horizon Media’s AI shopping trust-tax study adds a fourth KPI: whether the autonomous purchase makes the customer less likely to return.

The company expects 20-30% of their product purchases to happen via AI agents within the next year.

What This Means for B2B

If a $3.5 billion consumer brand is rebuilding its entire digital presence for AI agents, B2B companies can’t afford to ignore this shift. The data backs up the urgency: 73% of B2B buyers now use AI tools in purchase research, and AI search traffic converts at 5.1x the rate of Google organic. The parallels are direct: For the structural categories of B2B ecommerce that agentic commerce will reshape, see our B2B ecommerce examples guide.

Check your robots.txt right now. If you’re blocking AI crawlers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude), your content doesn’t exist in AI search results. We covered how to track AI-referred traffic in our Google Analytics traffic guide.

Structure content for AI readability. AI systems prefer clear H2/H3 hierarchies, direct answers to specific questions, and FAQ sections with structured markup. This aligns with what we recommend in our content strategy for SEO. Your technical SEO foundations — sitemaps, canonicalization, crawlability — are prerequisites for AI visibility, not just Google rankings.

Start measuring AI visibility. If you’re only tracking Google organic rankings, you’re missing a growing channel. AI search converts at 5.1x the rate of Google organic according to recent data. You need to know whether your brand appears when buyers ask AI assistants about solutions in your category. And it’s not just your website that matters — Trustpilot now ranks as the 5th most-cited website by ChatGPT, meaning review platforms are outranking vendor content in AI citations.

Your B2B SEO strategy now needs to account for both traditional search and AI-powered discovery. The sites that get crawled, cited, and referenced by AI systems will capture a growing share of the buying journey. By spring 2026 the operating reality landed at the catalog layer too — Feedonomics ACE confirmed catalog data is getting machine-readable across the stack, syndicating product feeds into OpenAI, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity directly. The document-surface side landed May 6: Adobe’s Acrobat Productivity Agent introduces PDF Spaces, an AI-queryable workspace primitive that gives B2B brands the same engagement-tracking advantage Mondelez built into its consumer brand-readiness program, applied to the documents they send to procurement and legal.

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