The news: Amazon is suing Perplexity, seeking to stop its Comet agentic AI browser from shopping on users’ behalf.

• Amazon alleges that Comet violates its terms of service, degrades the Amazon shopping experience, and creates privacy vulnerabilities, per Bloomberg.
• Perplexity called Amazon’s actions a “bully tactic” in a blog post referencing the lawsuit and argued the company should appreciate agentic AI’s ability to make shopping easier.

Zooming out: While shopping agents are growing in popularity, Amazon’s relationship with these tools has grown increasingly strained over the past year, including cutting off Google’s AI shopping agent.

• “There’s no personalization, there’s no shopping history, the delivery estimates are frequently wrong, the prices are often wrong,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the retailer’s Q3 earnings call.
• However, he said the retailer expects to eventually partner with third-party agents.

Why it matters to Amazon: Advertising added $17.7 billion to Amazon’s Q3 revenues, up 24% YoY, which includes placements on its site. If AI agents shop for customers, those ads lose visibility and their value could decline.

Agent-routed purchases could also limit Amazon’s access to customer data—another major selling point for its advertising business—and threaten its ability to deliver a more personalized, relevant experience to shoppers.

Why it matters for retailers: Amazon’s suit against Perplexity could become an important test case that helps define the limits for agentic AI and the actions retailers can take to protect themselves—at least temporarily—from the intrusion of AI agents.

However, it will not stop AI agents from gaining traction in ecommerce. Even if agents are barred from making the final purchase, they are beginning to take on a much larger role in research and product discovery. That trend favors Walmart, Etsy, and other retailers that have direct relationships with platforms like ChatGPT.

Why it matters for advertisers: If AI agents like Perplexity’s Comet start handling product discovery and purchase decisions directly, they could pose a serious threat to Amazon’s search and ad ecosystem.

Advertisers who rely on sponsored placements, display ads, and keyword targeting within Amazon’s marketplace would lose direct access to high-intent shoppers and visibility into who bought what and why, complicating attribution models and forcing a greater reliance on first-party data.

What brands should do: To stay relevant as agents reshape the shopping journey, brands need to ensure that content is not only visible in ads but also indexed by agentic tools. Diversifying budgets to include generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies, such as structuring product data, reviews, and metadata so that agentic systems can easily interpret them, could help soften visibility losses and preserve brand influence.

Retailers should also seriously consider whether to partner with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI platforms. While smaller brands may be wary of losing control over the customer experience or hampering their ability to build deeper relationships with shoppers, getting an early start could help companies stay relevant as AI shopping assistants gain popularity.