On 21 May 2024, Google Search Advocate John Mueller advised online retailers to verify that their stores can be used by agentic AI shopping tools after a Swiss market test showed that bot-defense systems still block many automated purchase attempts.
Agentic AI accessibility for online stores
Mueller observed that some anti-bot services treat AI agents the same way they treat malicious crawlers, inadvertently preventing legitimate transactions carried out on behalf of real shoppers. He recommended running basic checkout, form submission, and navigation tests with “common agents” to ensure the journey is possible without manual CAPTCHA intervention. He wrote that merchants should “check your online store to see if it works for shoppers using the common agents.”
Key findings from the Swiss test
- Consultant Malte Polzin used a ChatGPT-based agent on 20 May 2024 to evaluate the 50 largest Swiss retail sites.
- Most stores allowed the agent to complete product selection and payment.
- Failures were usually triggered by CAPTCHAs, Cloudflare Turnstile, maintenance splash pages, or broad bot-defense rules.
- Polzin posted the detailed results on LinkedIn; Mueller reshared the thread the next day.
Why it matters
Agentic AI tools can handle the entire shopping workflow - search, comparison, cart management, and payment - without human clicks or taps. OpenAI, Anthropic, and other vendors have demoed prototype shopping agents since late 2023. Just as retailers optimized sites for mobile users a decade ago, they may now need to accommodate autonomous browser sessions while still maintaining strong fraud controls.
Source references
- John Mueller, LinkedIn post, 21 May 2024.
- Malte Polzin, LinkedIn post detailing Swiss retailer test, 20 May 2024.
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