Some blocks appear quieter than others. Users report that sites including Cars.com and Amtrak, which previously worked with their agents, are no longer accessible, suggesting companies may be blocking agents without announcing it. Amazon, meanwhile, has been fighting agents since last year, when it banned Perplexity's agentic shopping feature and sued the startup. A judge initially ordered Perplexity to stop, but an appeals court overturned that ruling in August, and Amazon has since filed an amended complaint. Amazon's agents problem now extends to the newcomers: the company says Muse's continued access violates its site policies, and there are reports of Grok, Instinct and Dots being unable to use Amazon too.

Even sites that welcome agents can trip them up indirectly. Anti-bot systems built to stop scammers and hackers catch agents too, according to Chris Canal, CEO of AI safety evaluator EquiStamp, who told The Verge that agents trigger the same safeguards. Reddit users report Google blocking some accounts using Muse for suspicious activity, and checkout problems on Walmart despite its Meta partnership. Cloudflare has also joined the clampdown, following its 2025 one-click AI crawler block with measures against crawlers that scrape for both search indexing and AI training.

There is a work-around emerging: partnership rather than confrontation. Meta has teamed up with Walmart, Gap, Sephora and Best Buy so Muse can shop on their sites, and Shopify has opened its storefronts to AI agents. Meta's argument is that turning away an agent means turning away the customer behind it. Canal, though, thinks the blocks matter commercially: if companies actively stop agents doing what humans can do online, there are simply fewer useful things the agents can do, which he says affects the perceived value of the OpenAIs and Anthropics of this world.