Understanding AI-powered shopping and what it means for your business.
For two decades, the e-commerce industry invested heavily in bot protection. reCAPTCHA, WAFs, behavioural fingerprinting: all designed to keep automated traffic off our sites. It worked. But AI shopping agents are automated traffic, and the same defences that stopped credential stuffers in 2008 are now silently rejecting agents acting on behalf of real customers in 2026. In our scans, 25.7% of sites already block agent access entirely, and most of those merchants have no idea it is happening.
Provider Breakdown — 119 sites
How Hard Is It to Allow AI Agents?
Data from 486 unique e-commerce sites scanned by Aidō Lighthouse as of May 2026. Provider counts exclude scan artefacts (timeouts, DNS errors, unclassified). Bypass difficulty reflects the effort for a merchant to allowlist verified AI agent user agents — not the difficulty of malicious circumvention. Dataset grows with every scan; figures update as new sites are analysed. Learn how protocols like Visa TAP and ACP are creating verifiable agent identity →
AI agents are becoming the new shoppers. Learn what that means for your business and how to prepare.
Read ArticleEmerging standards like UCP, MCP, and WebMCP that will define the next era of e-commerce.
Read ArticleMost retail brands have launched AI agents on top of infrastructure that was never designed to support them. Here is the gap that is quietly capping your AI investment.
Read ArticleACP. UCP. MCP. TAP. VIC. MAP. Here is what each protocol does, which layer it operates at, and the infrastructure gap that stops all of them working.
Read Article345+ European retail sites scanned. 29% score zero on transactability. The agent does not see your brand story. It sees what it can parse — and for most sites, that is not much.
Read ArticleWe scanned 75 LATAM e-commerce sites. Average transactability: 29.4/100. The region has leapfrogged desktop commerce into WhatsApp — and left its web APIs behind.
Read Article19 marcas líderes analizadas. Puntuación agéntica promedio: 16.9/100. Las marcas de prestigio internacional tienen el mejor contenido y el peor checkout. Ninguna está lista.
Leer análisisWe scanned every brand listed on checkout.directory as UCP-ready. All 49 scored "Not Ready" for agentic commerce. Here's what the protocol doesn't cover.
Read ArticleGoogle AI Max reads Merchant Center attributes like a document. The bid strategy you spent five years optimising now matters less than the product data you wrote three months ago. Same logic applies to agents.
Read ArticleCatalogue tools were built for SEO. They average everything. AI shopping agents make decisions one product at a time, and the averages hide the products that will actually fail at checkout. Here is what we built instead.
Read ArticleAn open extension to the Google Merchant Center feed format that declares per-product agent purchase terms. What an agent is permitted to buy, which payment protocols you accept, whether the item is mandate-eligible. Published openly under CC BY 4.0.
Read the SpecFrom Archie in 1990 to GPTBot in 2023, the web has fought the same battle. Googlebot solved it in 1997. Almost nobody copied the approach. AI agents are about to re-learn the lesson.
Read ArticleWe joined the Basis Theory Agentic Commerce Consortium. Here's why the whitepaper's market problems map directly to what we see in our e-commerce readiness scans.
Read ArticleData from 500+ retailer scans. Where each industry stands, what separates AI-ready leaders from the rest, and the infrastructure gaps still blocking autonomous commerce.
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