The news: Amazon blocked several OpenAI-affiliated crawlers from accessing its site, a move first reported by ecommerce analyst Juozas Kaziukėnas. That marks the retailer’s latest attempt to keep third-party agents from encroaching on its turf and endangering ad revenues.
Zoom in: Amazon quietly updated its robots.txt file to prevent ChatGPT-User, the agent used to obtain live information from the web to answer user queries, and OAI-SearchBot, the crawler that underpins OpenAI’s SearchGPT search engine, from scraping its website.
While the move is not legally binding—and can therefore be ignored by the very bots Amazon is trying to keep out—it’s a clear sign of the retailer’s ambivalence toward agentic shopping.
- On the one hand, the company is bullish about AI agents’ ability to reshape the entire shopping experience; in particular, CEO Andy Jassy is confident that agentic commerce will help increase ecommerce’s share of total retail by making the experience of buying online on par with—if not better than—shopping in stores.
- On the other hand, AI agents pose a serious threat to Amazon’s ecommerce dominance and its advertising revenues. Many shoppers currently start their product searches on the retailer’s website, which, in addition to giving Amazon a tight grip on ecommerce spending, has helped turn it into an advertising giant. Should agents displace the company as that starting point, Amazon could lose influence over consumers’ purchase decisions and risk ceding ground to Walmart, Target, and other retailers that are more proactive about teaming up with AI platforms.
Our take: Amazon’s insistence on keeping AI agents at bay is the right move for the company for the time being. Adoption is minimal for now, hampered by trust issues, clunky UX, and minimal merchant participation.
However, the gates will have to open at some point. While Amazon hopes that its genAI investments, Prime perks, and other CX enhancements will enable it to keep its position as consumers’ primary shopping destination, more people are beginning to use genAI tools for product search and other shopping-related tasks. The longer Amazon resists shopping partnerships with the likes of ChatGPT, the more vulnerable it is to the very agentic revolution it expects to occur.