AI agents can book your trip and order your groceries — if websites don't slam the door first

The new wave of personal AI agents — Meta's Muse, Instinct, ChatGPT's Dots, and others — promises to do more than answer questions. They can book flights, reserve tables, and order groceries on your behalf, no technical setup required. But there is a catch, and it is a big one: the websites on the other end keep refusing to let them in.

The doors are closing

Amazon recently began blocking Meta's Muse from its retail site, meaning the agent can no longer browse or buy from its catalog, according to reporting by Bloomberg cited by TechCrunch. And the problem is not limited to Amazon. Complaints across social media describe agents being shut out of Walmart, various airlines, Yelp, eBay, Zillow, Pizza Hut, and Adidas — a wave of blocking that some users believe has recently intensified.

Walmart told TechCrunch the blocks were not intentional. The company is actually partnered with Muse, as announced at Meta's Connect developer conference in September, and says it wants to meet customers wherever they are — including AI agent experiences. Zillow said much the same: it allows agents acting on behalf of consumers, but its anti-scraping defenses can occasionally catch them.

Others are less welcoming. Yelp told TechCrunch it does not permit non-human traffic unless the agent has paid for access through its data licensing program — meaning booking a table or joining a waitlist through an agent will likely fail without a formal deal. Delta said it is working to protect customers from unauthorized automated activity, adding that opening up to agents would have to be done "with security and the customer experience in mind."

The standards race

Behind the scenes, an industry effort is trying to solve this at the protocol level. Meta, Walmart, Stripe, Sierra, Genesys, Rocket, NiCE, and Decagon have begun work on an open standard for how AI agents communicate with businesses — a way to distinguish good bots acting on a user's behalf from bad ones, focused on agent-to-agent communication for online commerce, according to a Meta blog post.

Cloudflare, whose protections guard much of the web, also drew suspicion: some observers link the blocks to a September 15 change to crawler defaults that let sites block AI training bots, which may have inadvertently pushed sites toward blocking AI agents too. Cloudflare said it had no specific data to share, though it also has a commercial interest in the space: it now runs a marketplace where AI bots pay for data access, and it is testing a browser built specifically for AI agents.

As Meta put it in its standards announcement: "Turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it." The agent era has arrived — the question is whether the web's front doors will open for it.

Written by the BidAsk Newsroom. Based on reporting from the sources below.