Meta, Walmart build standard as Muse gets blocked

The friction has been building as consumer agents moved from answering questions to actually transacting. Amazon's block of Muse was deliberate, but Walmart's case shows how easily the two causes blur: Walmart is partnered with Muse, announced at Meta's Connect developer conference in September, and calls the failures unintentional, yet its human-verification step can still eject the agent. The same ambiguity runs through the travel complaints. Delta says it has no integration letting a third-party agent book flights and frames any opening around security and customer experience, while United points to terms barring automatic devices without written permission.

Infrastructure sits underneath much of this. Cloudflare offers sites protection from AI agents, and some suspect it and similar content delivery networks are disrupting Muse traffic, tied to a September 15 change to crawler defaults that lets site owners block AI training while allowing other bots. Cloudflare said it had no specific data to share and pointed to its public data hub, which shows rising bot activity but does not separate good bots from bad. Cloudflare also runs a marketplace where AI bots pay for data access and recently began testing a browser built for AI agents.

The stakes now rest on whether norms reach enough sites to matter. Meta's answer has been specific partnerships, which it says make any access problem a reportable bug, plus a growing in-app connector list. But Yelp still requires agents to pay for content access through its data licensing program, and eBay says it restricts only unauthorized agents such as scrapers. Whether brands sign on or keep their own rules appears to decide how often a shopper's agent simply fails.