Amazon has blocked 3 AI shopping agents in 365 days. Shopify signed the latest o
By Shuqing Ke · October 3, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Amazon has blocked 3 AI shopping agents in 365 days.
Shopify signed the latest one within days.
→ Perplexity's Comet: blocked November 2025, court-ordered off Amazon in March.
→ ChatGPT's shopping agent: blocked too.
→ Meta's Muse: blocked this month, 12 days after it launched.
Amazon's stated reason: the agent doesn't say it's an agent, and it scrapes account data and login details.
The real reason is $68bn.
That's Amazon's ad revenue last year. Every dollar of it needs a human looking at a search results page. An agent that picks the product and checks out never sees one.
So Amazon would rather lose the agent than lose the ad.
Shopify did the opposite. Opened its stores to ChatGPT and Copilot. And days after the Muse block, a deal letting Muse check out through Shop Pay.
Their Q1 numbers: AI traffic up 8x. Orders from AI search up nearly 13x.
Here's the part nobody selling on Amazon has clocked.
Your customer is starting to shop by asking.
And the channel you've spent three years optimising is the one that's shut to the thing they're asking.
That already happened. This month.
♻️ Repost if your team hasn't checked this yet.
P.S. if you also run a Shopify or DTC site, open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for GPTBot. A lot of themes block it by default, so the model can't read you even when it wants to.
Check yours and tell me what you find. I'm wondering how common it is.