When Mondelez learned their retail partners were expecting 30% of their site traffic to be agentic by 2028, the company stopped and paid attention.
AI was upending the way people searched for products online, and the CPG brand was faced with a decision to make: overhaul its digital presence or risk falling behind in the age of agentic commerce.
“This is more than a $3.5 billion business for us in terms of digital commerce,” Andrew Lederman, vp of global digital commerce at Mondelez said. In reference to the AI-fueled digital commerce boom, he added, “There’s not too much question around ‘will it happen?’ The question just comes up of when it will happen.”
Leaderman joined a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast to talk about Mondelez’s digital commerce overhaul and what the future of AI search means for the company. Mondelez’s porftolio consists of Oreo, Ritz crackers, Sour Patch Kids and more.
Blocked bot crawlers
Publishers were already feeling the effects of AI search, grappling with traffic changes and bot crawlers. Brands now find themselves in a similar predicament.
Mondelez originally had AI bot crawlers blocked — worried about protecting intellectual property and maintaining control over content until marketers had more information overall. Then, the CPG giant noticed something: Oreo was only cited in about 10% of AI chatbot cookie recommendations. In part, the blocked bot crawlers were to blame, Lederman said.
Since then, Mondelez unblocked necessary bot crawlers and spent the last year working through an agentic commerce strategy — with search at the foundation.
“We actually had to fully take a different look at our brand.com experiences and make sure that they’re optimized towards AI,” Lederman said. “This is not something we had previously done.”
That overhaul meant clean site maps, proper .txt files, fast load times and machine readable content because “if they can’t crawl our site, nothing else matters,” he added. Unblocking the bot crawlers was only the first step in a three-part rebuild.
The bigger picture
The first pillar, per Lederman, focused on consistent, structured product knowledge across brand sites, earned media and other online sources. Second, scale AI native content to up the CPG’s chances of showing up in consumer prompts even outside of traditional cookie or snacking searches. Third is measurement — perhaps the most important piece of the equation, per Lederman.
“Our first move was to make sure that we had a measurement system in place, so that we can treat it like a performance marketing channel,” he said, referring to KPIs based on visibility, citation and sentiment.
There’s already been some improvement, said the Mondelez exec. For specific cookie-based queries, Oreo comes up around 70% of the time, he added. For broader, snack-related topics, citation is closer to 30%.
In the next year or so, Lederman expects a future where 20 to 30% of Mondelez product purchases happen via agents. Already, he’s thinking about next steps — things like instant check out features or LLMs within retail media — that will further fragment the digital landscape.
“We need to make sure that we can translate what humans think of when they think of Oreo or Cadbury or Milka into what AI thinks when they’re going after these brands,” he said. “That’s not an easy task.”