Meta's Muse agents face web blocks as sites reject AI visitors

The web has long sorted visitors into two buckets—bots and people—with rules governing what automated programs can access. Personal AI agents break that binary: they act for individual people but at machine speed, which is why platforms from reservation sites to retailers have started blocking them outright. Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agents and is waging a court battle against Perplexity, though a judge recently ruled in favor of Perplexity and Amazon has appealed.

As agent demand grows, platforms will find ways to let them in, especially since most agentic web traffic goes to e-commerce sites where money can be made. Shopify, for example, is already giving agents their own checkout lanes. The open question is what happens to the human web in the process—whether sites become neglected for people, verification becomes constant, and prices vary by agent, or whether rules still being written steer agents toward genuinely helping consumers.