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, 26.6% of sites already block agent access entirely, and most of those merchants have no idea it is happening.
Provider Breakdown — 95 sites
How Hard Is It to Allow AI Agents?
Data from 365 unique e-commerce sites scanned by Aidō Lighthouse as of April 2026. Provider counts exclude scan artefacts (timeouts, DNS errors). 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 →
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