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On 17 October 2026, The Verge ran the headline that websites were closing their doors to AI agents. Users of Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots or Instinct report blocks on major websites when their agent tries to buy, book or log in on their behalf. At the same time, other merchants are signing partnerships to welcome those very agents.
This post from our ecommerce section takes stock as of 19 October 2026, and translates the question for the online store of a company of 20 to 500 people. No agent is better than another here: they all run into the same doors.
In short
Yelp only accepts agents that pay for its data licence, Delta has no partnership allowing a third-party agent to book, and JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab block agents from accessing accounts for security reasons.
Others open up under conditions: Walmart, Gap, Sephora and Best Buy have partnerships with Meta’s agent, and Shopify has opened its stores to agents.
Many blocks are unintended: anti-bot protections also stop agents, and sometimes human customers.
For a store, the decision is made door by door: reading the catalogue, logging into an account, paying.
Who is closing the door, and why
The reasons differ from one website to the next. TechCrunch asked the brands involved on 6 October, and The Verge completed the picture on the 17th:
Those closing the door
Amazon blocks Meta’s agent, which it says violates its policies, after suing Perplexity
Yelp refuses non-human traffic outside its paid data licence
Delta protects its customers from unauthorised automated activity
JPMorgan Chase and Schwab block agents from accessing accounts, for security
Those opening under conditions
Walmart, Gap, Sephora and Best Buy have signed with Meta’s agent
Shopify has opened its network of stores to agents
eBay does not ban all shopping agents, only unauthorised agents and actions, such as automated data harvesting or model training
Zillow accepts agents acting on behalf of a consumer
Amazon’s case shows that the question is also a legal one. A judge had ordered Perplexity to stop its agents from shopping on the site, before an appeals court overturned that ruling in August; Amazon has since filed an amended complaint, reports The Verge. For Perplexity, an agent is just an extension of its user. For Amazon, a third party buying for a customer “should operate openly and respect” the merchant’s decision.
Blocking without having decided to
A good share of the blocks is intended by no one. Walmart, a partner of Meta’s agent, saw purchases fail because of the button that checks a visitor is human: if the check is interrupted, the agent is thrown out, and one human customer even complained he could no longer sign in, according to TechCrunch. The same article attributes some of the blocks to a change in Cloudflare’s default settings for AI bots on 15 September.
From the field
On Palmora Property, a real estate portal we run, the robots.txt file served by the content delivery network blocked GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot and Google-Extended, while nothing in the website’s code showed it: the setting lived with the provider, not in the repository. The site was closing itself to AI engines without anyone having decided so. Since then, our visibility audit starts by testing what the bots actually receive.
What it changes: before deciding to open or close, check what your website already does. Your host, your content delivery network or your store platform may have decided for you.
Three doors, three decisions
An agent does not do just one thing. It reads, it logs in, it pays, and each action has its own stakes:
What an agent can do on a store
- Read
Catalogue, prices, stock, reviews; this is what makes you appear in an assistant’s answer.
- Log in
The customer’s account, addresses, history; the fraud risk starts here.
- Pay
The order commits the customer and you; this is where banks and merchants set their conditions.
- Reading is usually worth opening: a catalogue that assistants cannot read does not exist in their answers. The files that make their job easier are presented in llms.txt, what it is really for, and the difference between indexing bots and training bots in Meta’s terms on crawling websites.
- Logging in needs rules: an agent that logs in on behalf of a customer must be recognisable as such, with limited rights. The banks settled it by keeping reading open and closing actions, a logic detailed in banks are blocking AI agents.
- Paying is the most binding door. Meta, Walmart, Stripe and others are working on an open standard so that agents can talk to merchants, and to tell good agents from bad ones, according to TechCrunch. In the meantime, a confirmation by the customer remains the simplest safeguard.
What it changes for a store run by 20 to 500 people
Agent-driven commerce is still marginal in an average store’s sales, and nothing forces a decision this week. But three steps cost little and avoid having things decided for you:
- Observe.
What AI bots and agents receive on your product pages and your checkout, content delivery network settings included.
- Decide door by door.
Reading open or not, agent logins accepted or not, payment subject or not to a customer confirmation.
- Write it down.
In your terms of use and in the configuration, so that the decision survives the next change of host or platform.
Agents replace neither the purchase journey nor follow-ups: a cart abandoned by an agent is followed up like any other, along the lines of abandoned cart reminders, and a product page that converts also gives the agent the information it needs to choose. The same clean product data already serves to sell on Google Shopping and marketplaces. What an agent is, and what it is not, is explained in what is an AI agent. The other side of the topic, agents hijacked to attack websites, is in AI agents and cyberattacks, and the rest of the month in our October AI news for business leaders.
Access security also ties into a regulatory calendar: NIS2 in France for cybersecurity, and the marking of generated content on 2 December if your product visuals are created with AI, within the framework revised by the Digital Omnibus in the AI Act. Every date is in our digital regulation calendar.
For a store that wants to decide what it opens to agents without breaking its checkout, see our ecommerce offer.
Frequently asked questions
Should you let AI agents buy on your website?
It is a business decision, not a technical one. An agent buying for a customer brings a sale, but it can also be used for fraud or to harvest your catalogue. Most merchants who open up do so through partnerships, with identified agents; those who close cite security or their data licence.
How do I know if my website already blocks AI agents?
Test what bots actually receive, not just what your code says: the content delivery network or the host may serve a robots.txt or blocking rules that appear nowhere in the website’s repository. Access logs and a purchase attempt by an agent complete the picture.
Does blocking AI bots hurt visibility in ChatGPT or Gemini?
Blocking the bots that read your pages can remove you from the answers of the assistants that rely on them. Blocking only training bots or purchase actions does not have the same effect. That is why the decision is made bot by bot and action by action, rather than in a single setting.
Can an AI agent pay on behalf of a customer?
Some already do with partner merchants. Industry players, including Meta, Walmart and Stripe, are preparing an open standard to frame this exchange. For an independent store, asking the customer for confirmation before payment remains the simplest solution, whatever the agent’s brand.
Sources
- TechCrunch (new tab)techcrunch.com
- The Verge (new tab)theverge.com
Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
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