The first holiday season of the AI shopping agent is arriving, and the biggest stores in America cannot agree on whether to let it in.
Walmart has built a dedicated entrance for software that shops on a customer’s behalf. Amazon has posted a guard at the door. Most other large retailers sit somewhere in between, either picking which AI platforms they will work with or, in a surprising number of cases, turning agents away without meaning to. For consumers who have started handing errands to assistants like Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Agent or Grok Bot from SpaceX Super Intelligence (SpaceXSI, the AI company formerly known as xAI), the result is a patchwork: an agent that breezes through one checkout can hit a wall at the next.
WebProNews reviewed retailer announcements, terms of service and recent reporting to map where the major chains stand. The short version is in the chart below. The longer version says a lot about who expects to own the customer relationship once software starts doing the shopping.
See the full list of 44 retailers and how each treats AI agents below.
No large retailer has gone further than Walmart. On Oct. 21 the company announced three pieces meant to make outside agents a sanctioned way to shop at Walmart and Sam’s Club. Agent Profiles give each agent its own identity inside a customer’s account, so its orders show up separately. Shoppers can require approval for every purchase or let the agent buy within a cap they choose; Walmart uses $50, $100 and $200 as examples, and says it may still ask for extra approval below the limit. Walmart says Profiles will launch within a month of the announcement.
The second piece is the Walmart Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets approved agents search inventory and place orders directly instead of clicking through pages built for people. It starts as a beta for companies and developers, and, as TechCrunch noted, it is designed so agents can find a customer’s usual items without Walmart handing over the shopper’s broader purchase history.
The third piece is a set of rules. Agents may not act beyond what the shopper intends, never receive card numbers, cannot add or change payment methods and get only the data a task requires. Walmart’s normal returns process applies even when an agent gets something wrong. Agents that break the terms “will be blocked from Walmart’s site.” The company also made a pricing promise that matters to anyone worried about bots being charged differently: “We price products, not people, so the prices that an AI agent sees are the same prices that a human would see on Walmart.com,” it said, as CNBC reported.
Walmart already sells through conversational integrations with Muse, ChatGPT and Gemini alongside its own Sparky assistant. PYMNTS described one version of that hybrid: Gemini surfaces Walmart products, then hands the basket to Sparky. Meta’s Connect announcements in September listed Walmart first among new Muse shopping connectors, and Walmart and Shopify are among the companies developing the Personal Agent Protocol that Meta and Sierra announced in October, according to PYMNTS.
Amazon is the opposite pole. On Sept. 20 it cut Muse off from shopping on Amazon.com. Users began seeing a pop-up that read, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed,” GeekWire reported. Amazon said Meta never told it Muse would access the store, that the agent did not identify itself and that it appeared to capture customer credentials. Meta has said Muse cannot see passwords or payment methods.
“We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
The legal footing for that position is in Amazon’s Conditions of Use, which now include Agent Terms. Any agent must announce itself in its user-agent string as “Agent/[agent name],” must not mimic human typing or solve CAPTCHAs, must answer truthfully when asked if it is a computer, and may not access Amazon at all if the company has asked it to stay away. Amazon reserves the right to limit agents “at our sole discretion.” The Muse block followed a lawsuit Amazon filed against Perplexity last year over its Comet browser agent, a case in which, The Verge noted, a federal appeals court sided with Perplexity in August, though the ruling left Amazon room to pursue claims based on its terms of service.
The business stakes are spelled out in The Wall Street Journal’s “The Shopping Bots Are Coming for Amazon”, published Nov. 1. Amazon took in nearly $70 billion in advertising revenue last year, the Journal reported, much of it from sponsored placements in front of shoppers. An agent that weighs specs and prices instead of scrolling past ads weakens the reason brands pay for those placements. Walmart and Shopify, the paper noted, have cut deals with Meta over Muse while Amazon has kept it out.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy played down the threat on the company’s earnings call last week. Amazon’s own Alexa for Shopping “is going to be the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon,” he said, adding that it had been used by more than 400 million people in the past year. Of outside agents, he said “few customers are doing much shopping this way yet, as the experience is still not great, nor more convenient than coming to a retailer directly.” Amazon also runs a Buy for Me feature that uses its own agent to purchase from other brands’ sites without the shopper leaving Amazon, a point one marketplace executive told CNBC shows the dispute is “about who holds the data” more than about agents themselves.
SpaceXSI’s Grok Bot belongs to the newer class of personal agents that shop the open web the way a person would, by driving a browser through a merchant’s own pages, with purchases going back to the user for approval. Payments and fraud firm Forter groups it with Muse, Instinct and ChatGPT Agent as screen-scraping agents, as opposed to protocol checkouts like OpenAI’s and Google’s. Forter’s October data shows it first detected Grok Bot orders on Sept. 1. Counting Grok Bot and Instinct, agentic orders on Forter’s network grew 48% from August to September, double the 24% rate without them. Forter also found that Grok Bot now has the largest share of orders above $500 and the highest average purchase, just ahead of OpenAI. The average agentic order across all agents was $226.
That browser-first approach is also why Grok Bot runs into the same wall as Muse. In mid-October, users posted that their Grok Bot agents could no longer order from Amazon and shared the same “unauthorized AI agent” message Muse users had seen, Teslarati reported. Amazon has not commented publicly on Grok Bot specifically. Elon Musk’s answer was to route around it. “Just ask Grok @Bot to buy what you want someplace else and get a better deal. There are far more purchasing websites than just Amazon!” he wrote on X, and he earlier showed an order the agent placed on Lego’s website. He later mused, “Maybe we should start a competitor to Amazon,” though no product or plan has followed.
In practice, Grok Bot works wherever a retailer’s defenses let a browsing agent through, which, given the chart above, is still a large share of the web. The bigger question for it and every other open-web agent is whether retailers move toward Walmart’s model of identified, permissioned agents, which a browser-driving bot would need to adapt to, or toward Amazon’s model of closed doors.
Several large retailers have chosen to meet agents on platforms they have vetted.
QVC and HSN are among the most open. A QVC Group executive told the Journal the shopping networks let agents complete purchases and proactively send their catalogs to OpenAI and Google, while conceding that legacy security systems may block some agents unintentionally. Etsy lets U.S. shoppers buy some listings directly inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Copilot. Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts let eligible merchants syndicate products into ChatGPT, Google’s AI tools, Copilot and Meta from one dashboard.
Then there is the Muse roster. Beyond Walmart, Meta added Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Gap, Michael Kors, Sephora, Ulta and Wayfair as shopping connectors in September, plus Shop Pay and PayPal for payments. Those are partnerships with one agent, not an open invitation to all of them, but they place a sizable slice of mall retail on the welcoming side of the line.
Target straddles the line. It calls itself the first mass retailer with shopping available across Google’s AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, including multi-item baskets and Target Circle loyalty sign-in. Its own site is a different matter. A Target spokesperson told The Verge that the company has safeguards preventing unauthorized agents and bots from accessing customer accounts and starting transactions, and the reporter found Muse caught by Target’s bot check one day and through it the next.
Others are trying to have it both ways too. Tapestry, parent of Coach and Kate Spade, sells through Google’s AI Mode and Gemini with explicit shopper approval on every order, but agents still cannot check out on the brands’ own websites, according to PYMNTS, citing the Journal. The company pointed to fraud and “inventory hoarding,” bots filling carts without buying, while saying it is preparing its systems in case it opens checkout later.
Home Depot says it will support agents that search, compare and buy, provided they identify themselves and the customer they represent. Chief Information Officer Angie Brown said the company is in active talks with Meta over how Muse should introduce itself, PYMNTS reported, citing Business Insider.
The RealReal shows how fast these positions move. Its chief technology officer told The Verge the luxury resale site would “remain open to third-party AI agents, allowing them to browse, log in and interact with our marketplace.” Then a Verge reporter showed Muse could keep renewing 20-minute cart holds on fresh listings all day, freezing other shoppers out. The company updated its bot defenses to stop that behavior while still letting agents point shoppers to items.
On the closed side with Amazon, Kohl’s does not let agents make purchases, a spokeswoman told the Journal, even as it runs its own Gemini-built shopping assistant. eBay changed its User Agreement in January to bar “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review” without its permission, after adding a robot and agent policy to its robots.txt file that blocked Perplexity, Anthropic and Amazon bots while still allowing Google’s shopping bot. eBay has said it is testing agentic experiences of its own.
The most striking finding in the research is how few retailers have decided anything at all. Identity-verification firm Billions Network audited the published access rules of 51 large U.S. online retailers in August. Only 11 had taken a deliberate position on AI agents. Five explicitly restrict them. Another 37 block shopping agents largely by accident, through older robots.txt rules written to keep scrapers out of login and checkout pages. None had a way for a verified agent to complete a purchase, a finding CNBC also highlighted. Pottery Barn, West Elm and Williams-Sonoma came closest by publishing an llms.txt file that tells agents how to navigate their sites. Billions sells identity and verification tools for AI agents, so it has a stake in the problem it measured. The audit is also a dated snapshot of retailers’ published robots.txt files and terms of service as of August, and Billions itself notes those are stated policies, not proof of how sites actually enforce them.
A separate scan by Rezolve Ai of the National Retail Federation’s top 100 found only three publish a file telling an agent how to check out: Chewy, Lululemon and Academy Sports + Outdoors. Costco, Apple, Home Depot and Target all showed nothing published for agents, which says less about intent than about how new the problem is. Apple and Costco have not publicly staked out a position.
The chart at the top covers the headline names. The grid below goes wider, sorting 44 major retailers by how they treat AI shopping agents today. Placements in the first three groups come from partnership announcements, company statements or the retailers’ own terms. The fourth group, and several notes elsewhere, come from the Billions Network audit‘s published dataset, which classifies each site’s robots.txt and terms. As noted above, Billions sells identity tools for AI agents, its audit reflects stated policies as of August rather than proven enforcement, and some retailers have struck partnerships since. Where a retailer partners with an agent platform but its own site rules still block agents, both facts are listed.
The split tracks business models more than technology. Walmart wants incremental orders and is willing to manage agents to get them. Amazon earns a fortune when people browse its pages. “Same agent, different business model, different answer,” PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote. She also argued the two giants are closer than they look: “Agents come in on the owner’s terms.”
That framing points to where this is heading. The retailers that are open are mostly open on their terms, through vetted platforms, protocols, profiles and spending caps. The ones that are closed say they want agents to identify themselves first. A PYMNTS Intelligence survey found 80% of mid-size merchants expect to pay a fee or commission on agent-driven sales, which suggests blocking is often a negotiating position rather than a permanent stance.
For shoppers, the practical advice is simple for now. An agent can do the research almost anywhere. Whether it can finish the purchase depends on the store, and at the largest online store in the country, the answer is still no.
The Retail Wall Around AI Shopping Agents: Who Lets the Bots Buy, and Who Shuts the Door first appeared on Web and IT News.
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