AI shopping traffic up 393% YoY, but bot detection is quietly blocking paying customers
Shufti-Global · reddit · 2026-11-04
Adobe Analytics puts AI-assistant traffic to US retail sites up 393% YoY in Q1, and those shoppers tend to spend more — assistants can browse products, fill forms, and help with checkout.
The catch: bot detection systems flag these assistants as suspicious (no normal browser, fast navigation, form fills without clicks) and block them, so a customer who wanted to buy just sees a broken site and leaves silently.
The author argues "is a human behind this" was never the right question — a scraper and a shopping assistant are both automated; what matters is whether a genuine customer sent it and authorized the actions, which bot detection was never built to answer. Some stores block AI agents deliberately, but many block them via rules nobody has reviewed in years, and both look identical in logs. Worth checking what share of your blocked traffic was people trying to spend money.
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