• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, July 31, 2025

Amazon, Shopify and other marketplaces have been spotted by technology experts embedding code to keep out AI agents from Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, OpenAI, and others because they are developing their own.

Google is the most recent company that techies found Amazon has blocked according to a post on LinkedIn. The post describes a shopping agent block list in robots.txt. AI agents act autonomously to complete tasks on the user’s behalf.

Juozas Kaziukenas, entrepreneur and advisor to several companies such as Quartile, which enables brands and agencies to scale campaigns, shared the post from Jan Caerels, SEO specialist at TUI, who explained the move.

“No one wants to be where the AI agents are shopping at - everyone wants to build AI agents that do the shopping,” Kaziukenas wrote.

Tech experts are on the hunt for any code that will disrupt the flow of AI agents across the internet.

Keaton G, senior solutions architect in APAC at Criteo, believes Amazon is making a big mistake.

“They are repeating the defensive maneuvers of the music industry all over again,” he wrote. “Agentic commerce will now just direct people away from Amazon.”

He believes Amazon will lose market share if they continue to block the agents, he wrote in the comment section in which Chris Brinkworth, managing partner at Civic Data, agreed.

Shopify blocked all AI bots from checking out and added a code rule to each website hosted on Shopify. The code reads "Automated scraping, “buy-for-me” agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without a final human review step is not permitted," according to Kaziukenas, who shared the post from Johnny Herge, managing technical SEO at Amsive, a performance marketing agency.

“One side of the coin is the possible future of agentic shopping - systems that do shopping for us,” Kaziukenas wrote. “The other side of the coin is that no one wants to be aggregated; everyone wants to be aggregator.”

Kaziukenas believes this is why Amazon has no interest in Google building any automation on top of its marketplace. It only wants to build "Buy for Me" on top of other websites. Shopify also would prefer to turn its millions of merchants into a storefront for AI tools to consume.

“Unless they work out a partnership, of course,” he wrote. “Perplexity and ChatGPT/OpenAI already did.”

Walmart recently pointed to a world without search bars, opting instead for AI agents to find what consumers need. The goal is to eliminate the need for consumers to search.

“At least Google is developing Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol which is needed... Amazon just worried about losing their online empire,” wrote Todd Watts, developer at Engineered Tax Services.