Websites are blocking personal AI agents, some on purpose and some by accident

Personal AI agents that book flights, order groceries and make reservations on a user's behalf are increasingly being refused by the sites they visit. Meta's Muse, the Instinct app and OpenAI's Dots are among them. Amazon has deliberately started blocking Muse from browsing or buying in its store, and user complaints suggest blocking has grown lately.

“There is a path that is good for users and good for businesses. It starts with clear norms, gives businesses more predictable control, and evolves toward a more efficient way for agents to work together.”

Meta, in its announcement of plans for an agent standard · techcrunch.com ↗

Not every refusal is intended. Walmart, which was announced as a Muse partner at Meta's Connect event in September and says it wants to be wherever its customers are, sees Muse purchases fail because the check that asks a visitor to click to prove they are human gets interrupted; Walmart says that is not deliberate. That suggests the human-verification checks built to stop spam and bots may not fit an era of agents. The result is a patchwork in which one site welcomes an agent, another blocks it and a third catches it by mistake. Users also report trouble at Yelp, eBay, Zillow, Pizza Hut, Adidas and several airlines. Some eBay accounts were suspended, and Google reportedly removed Instinct from a Gmail clean-up job. Google says shared VPN networks can trigger reCAPTCHA because the traffic looks automated, and agents run into the same checks.

Several companies have said where they stand. Yelp lets non-human traffic through only from agents that pay under its data-licensing programme. eBay's user agreement bars unauthorised buy-for-me agents, though it says it targets unauthorised agents, scraping and model training rather than every shopping agent. Zillow allows agents the consumer has authorised, but its anti-scraping defences can still catch some. Delta says it has no partnership or integration that lets a third-party agent shop or book on its site, that it is protecting customers from unauthorised automation, and that any opening would have to be made with security and the customer experience in mind; it did not confirm blocking particular agents. It adds that it keeps evaluating how outside agents could serve customers. United points to terms of use that ban robots and other automatic devices without its written permission, and did not say whether it blocks Muse. JPMorgan's CFO, Jeremy Barnum, called agents that use shared logins and screen scraping to move money not secure and said customers may bear responsibility.

Cloudflare changed its defaults on 15 September 2026. New domains allow search crawlers but block AI training bots and agents on pages that show ads, and older sites that already blocked AI bots were moved to block agents on ad pages too. Cloudflare gave no specific figures and pointed to its Radar data, which shows rising bot activity but does not separate good bots from bad ones. It also runs a marketplace where AI bots pay for data, and is testing a browser built for agents. Amazon argues that Perplexity's Comet agent breaks its access rules and puts customer data at risk, while Perplexity says its users authorised it. The sharpest dispute is that one: a federal appeals court vacated a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in August 2026, and the case goes on.

Meta and partners including Walmart, Stripe, Sierra, Genesys, Rocket, NiCE and Decagon have begun work on an open standard for how agents deal with businesses, since sites still have no common way to tell a user's own agent from a bad bot. Amazon, for its part, runs its own Buy for Me feature that purchases from other brands' sites. Meta's decision to sign partners for Muse access means that at those sites a failure is a reportable bug. Meta argues that turning away an agent means turning away the customer, and it expects a larger reorganisation of the Muse partner list as the app expands, now including tools for small businesses.