We spent twenty years teaching ourselves to talk like search engines—"running shoes men size 10" instead of actual sentences. Now AI agents understand natural language, and the entire payments infrastructure built for keyword search suddenly needs to learn conversational commerce.
In Part 1, I explore:
The shift from constrained syntax to natural discourse
Why context, pronouns, and semantic understanding replaced keyword matching
The SEO to AEO transition (and what it means for product discovery)
Why trust is a barrier after years of systems failing to understand us
This isn't about adding chatbots to checkout. It's about recognizing the language of commerce has fundamentally changed.
Part 2 (Friday) dives into how payments infrastructure learns to speak human—and why that's both a linguistic and security challenge.
Key Concepts:
Constrained syntax vs. discourse
Speech acts (J.L. Austin)
Pragmatics and context-dependence
Anaphoric resolution
Lexical vs. compositional semantics
SEO to AEO
