Retailers now face automated visitors they want to serve. Some are AI shopping agents like Instinct or Muse. Others are answer engines like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. Marketplaces like Amazon also use agents to scrape product data. Blocking too aggressively risks cutting off these new customer journeys. Allowing too freely invites fraud and scraping risks. Bot management must now treat agents as a spectrum of actors. Transparency and explainability are needed to govern access. Commerce and security teams must align on which agents to serve. Vendors must provide context behind classifications and decisions.
What changed
Retailers treated all bots as threats to be blocked.
What it unlocks
Serving AI agents and answer engines while still blocking malicious bots.
- 80% of online adults use AI tools to compare products
- 17 vendors used bot management for account fraud
- 14 for e-commerce fraud
- 14 for web and LLM scraping
What you need to act on it
- a bot and agent trust management policy
- visibility and explainability from vendors
Sources