Test finds 98 of 200 US retailers stop AI shopping agents

Human Forward, a UK firm, used 8 AI assistants to get data about 200 US retailers and brands. It also looked at each site for the standards that AI agents use to find products and check out. It found that 98 sites stopped its crawler or gave no page. The crawler is a tool that reads web pages. Black Friday is in less than 1 month.

What the test did

Human Forward first looked at 75 UK retailers with 6 assistants. Then 1 in 5 were not prepared for AI shopping. The new test looks at 200 US sites.

The numbers

• 98 of 200 sites stopped the crawler or gave no page.
• 2 of 48 large retailers that it could read are set up for agent checkout.
• 58 of 63 sites that stopped it say in their robots.txt file that AI is welcome.
• 7 of 8 assistants gave the color Purple, not the mattress company.

What is not known

The report gives no cause for the stops. The author says the large retailers work with 1 or 2 assistants, not with all. The author says this is a risk unless all shoppers use the same agent.

Insight: Retailer stops look like accidents, not strategy

Human Forward found that 58 of 63 sites that stopped its crawler say AI is welcome. An audit of 51 US retailers found that 37 stop agents by accident. Encore says a blocked agent finishes its task on a site of a rival. Retailers can stop agents by accident. The first retailer that opens its site to all agents can get the customers that other retailers stop.