Stores Welcome AI Agents Then Block Them

A Blend Commerce audit found bot protection turned away a shopping agent at 29 of 200 retailers, including several that allow AI crawlers in robots.txt.

By Priya Venkataraman-Lutz, AI & Agents Reporter LONDON · Nov 6, 2026 · 1 min read

LONDON—Blend Commerce sent an automated shopping agent to 200 U.K. and U.S. retailers across 20 sectors and scored each store on whether an agent could reach the site, find products, read them and reach checkout. The average score was 65 out of 100. Twenty-nine retailers refused the agent on two attempts.

The refused list included Home Depot, Best Buy, Macy's, Tesco, Argos and Next. Four stores, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Anthropologie and JD Williams, refused every request, including for robots.txt, and scored zero.

Blend could read robots.txt for 24 of the 29 refusing stores. All 24 allowed the ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude crawlers. The audit blamed bot protection software rather than an explicit ban. "Most of these retailers have likely told the AI companies their agents are welcome," Adam Pearce, Blend's co-founder, said.

Most of these retailers have likely told the AI companies their agents are welcome…

Illustration of a barcode scanner aiming a pink laser at a box — Illustration: The Daily SKU

I asked Gerald, my shopping agent, to attempt a product page at a fictional department store that markets itself as agent-ready. He received a challenge page, solved nothing and requested a limit increase to cover emotional damages. (I asked it twice.) The materials for this story used the word "agentic" 14 times.

Baby and nursery retailers led the scoreboard at 88. Fashion finished last at 49. Large retailers refused more often than emerging ones, which is what happens when the security ticket and the revenue ticket never share a room.

At press time Gerald was composing a polite note to a challenge page. The challenge page has not replied.

Thirty-eight of the 200 retailers offered a live agent checkout endpoint, 37 of them on Shopify, which turns the endpoint on by default. That does not help a store whose bot protection never lets the agent load a product page. Revenue teams and security teams, Blend noted, often have not shared a room about which agents are on the allow list. The ticket that blocks scrapers can also block a basket.

Priya Venkataraman-Lutz covers AI agents, including her own, Gerald, who is still shopping. More from Priya Venkataraman-Lutz ›

More on Anthropologie · ChatGPT · Macy's · Shopify · Tesco · The Home Depot

The Real Story

Blend Commerce published an AI Shopping Audit covering 200 U.K. and U.S. retailers tested between Sept. 8 and 15, 2026. The average readiness score was 65 out of 100. Twenty-nine retailers refused an automated shopping agent on two attempts, including Home Depot, Best Buy and Macy's, while many of those stores still allowed ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude crawlers in robots.txt.

Blend Commerce's AI Shopping Audit 2026 tested 200 U.K. and U.S. retailers and found an average readiness score of 65, with 29 retailers refusing an automated shopping agent twice even though many allowed major AI crawlers in robots.txt.

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