Your AI shopping agent can't get past a CAPTCHA, and some stores like it that way

The pitch for personal agents is that they finish the job: fill the cart, book the flight, pay the bill. The reality, according to a rundown by Engadget's Husain Parvez, is that many websites either don't want them or can't tell them apart from the bots they already block.

Blocked on purpose

Amazon is the clearest case. Engadget, citing TechCrunch, says Amazon deliberately keeps Meta's Muse from shopping on its site. It is also still fighting Perplexity over the Comet browser, claiming the agent violates its rules for automated access and endangers shoppers' data. Perplexity counters that users authorized it. In August a federal appeals court threw out an early injunction against Perplexity, but the dispute goes on. Meanwhile, Amazon's own Buy for Me feature shops on other brands' sites.

eBay's user agreement forbids unauthorized buy-for-me agents. Delta says it has no integration for third-party booking agents, without saying whether it blocks any.

Banks have the strongest reason. JPMorgan Chase finance chief Jeremy Barnum told analysts in October that some agents move money using shared logins and screen scraping, which he called insecure. The bank blocks those methods where it can, and he warned that customers who hand over credentials could be liable if an agent does something they didn't intend.

Blocked by accident

Walmart, one of Muse's retail partners, says its human-verification checks weren't meant for the assistant but still stop it. Zillow concedes that its scraper defenses occasionally trap agents it's happy to have. For the user it looks the same either way: the agent stalls and you're back at the keyboard.

Infrastructure is starting to separate the categories. Cloudflare lets site owners treat search crawlers, training bots and user-directed agents differently, and since September 15 new Cloudflare domains default to allowing search crawlers while blocking training bots and agents on pages with ads. Shopify's checkout tools let compatible agents fill in details and place orders once the buyer confirms, handing control back for authentication.

If you build agents

Assume a site is hostile to automation until it says otherwise. Agents that ride on a scraped, logged-in session are exactly what banks and retailers are closing off. Agents that use sanctioned paths, like Shopify's checkout support, get further. And design the hand-back to a human as a normal step, because verification prompts aren't going away.

Scoreboard update: Humans +1. Websites, not agents, still decide who gets through the door.

Stay undead.