(Shrug) Well, they must not want to sell anything to me.
This is not a battle that site owners want to fight. They may think it is, but they're horrifically wrong about that.
If I have to drive to the store to get it, I wouldn’t have shopped with them! It feels like every time I don’t order with Amazon the stores remind me why I ought to.
Wasn't there some restaurant review site that gets accused of doing pay-to-play hiding of negative reviews and promoting positive ones that calls up businesses and basically extorts them into their services? They have all the incentive in the world now to manipulate the results shown to AI agents. You won't even see the manipulation directly yourself when there's an AI sitting between you and the source acting like an obfuscation layer.
Fortunately, if AI is really superhuman in capabilities it may still win the battle for the customer and keep prices competitive: aggressive price comparison, alternatives discovery, negotiation, group buying, etc.
I mean there are multiple reasons not just the AI agents but that's also a part of it
Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.
People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.
It really sucks for small businesses. Their websites get absolutely hammered and they can’t afford or don’t know how to stop it. Cloudflare ends up winning as they’re the easiest solution.
> Instead of trying to fight Amazon, the company has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.
they're making deals with the sites so that the agents can work, the sites get compensated. I hope for this "AI can do what it wants if it pays" model to expand further. Cloudflare told us months ago we'd have an option to get paid by AI crawlers. I signed up to join but of course as a nobody I never got a reply.
First they forced their malware bot farms on us, now they want to rent them to us so they can turn the entire web into the dark web.
And eventually rug pull off the major retail sites and just redirect traffic to their own darker sites to scrape commissions, sell direct and keep the change.
I'm sure the teams thinking this up buy their lunches from a ghost kitchen run by illegals that's never had a health inspection,
located in the back of a laundromat with a phony business license and website that only accepts crypto.
spwa4•1h ago
cyanydeez•57m ago
Look at spotify and their royalties. Theres already such little value in human based internet that agents will race to the bottom.
The only internet content will be worse than adware. Itll just be agent poison meant to take your money.
Any other viewpoint seems to ignore the already shattered shared internet.