OpenAI Dots, Grok bots, Meta Muse and OpenClaw Instinct, among others, will take consumers into the world of agentic commerce this holiday season -- marking a major shift in digital advertising and
marketing.
Agentic purchases will drive $100 billion in online sales in the next 12 months, according to Menlo Ventures. Its State of Consumer AI, published in September 2026, estimates total aggregate consumer AI spend has already
reached $40 billion globally for the year.
Consumers are handing AI more control. The study found that 41% of participants had tried an AI agent, while 24% said they use one regularly and 32%
have allowed an AI to act on their behalf without final approval.
Among those who use artificial intelligence (AI) agents, 92% said they pay for AI, while 63% use it daily, according to Menlo
Ventures.
Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) and paid-media ads target human eye movement and keywords.
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With AI agents, marketers
must shift to agent
optimization. Because Meta Muse recommends products from the open web -- at a rate of four out of six times, according to some data, despite pulling 60 products from
Meta's internal catalog -- retailers must ensure their websites are structured for AI bots to scrape, read, and trust.
Advertisers may see a loss of impulse buys as users increasingly allow AI to act on their
behalf without final approval and the traditional conversion funnel shrinks.
If an AI agent automatically buys the best-reviewed, lowest-priced item that matches a user's criteria,
traditional mid-funnel marketing such as retargeting ads, abandoned cart emails, and Instagram influencer placements begin to lose their effectiveness and efficacy. The transaction happens entirely
autonomously in the background without marketers' knowledge.
Personal agents differ from Answer Engines in the way they act, not just what they know.
To determine how personal context
and defined workflows shape a personal agent’s behavior, Menlo based its findings on a survey of 5,067 U.S.
adults conducted with Morning Consult in July 2026, which explored the ways that consumers have used AI and other tools to complete specific activities over the past six months, along with their
attitudes toward the technology.
Supporting this shift, Profound analysts in another research project ran 50 shopping prompts through Muse and found that while a typical search pulled
roughly 60 products from Meta's catalog and just four from the web, four of the six products Muse ultimately recommended came from the web.
Although Muse looked almost entirely at
Facebook and Instagram products, which support Meta’s catalog, to find options, it ultimately selected and recommended mostly general internet websites for its final recommendations.
The
Profound team also analyzed traffic across 280 retail and e-commerce sites before and after Muse launched. In the 20-day period following launch, a signal the analysts used as a proxy for
Muse jumped 1,313% across U.S. and Canadian sites, where Muse was available, versus 827% elsewhere.
Unlike some answer engines, Muse and Instinct do not identify themselves by name when
browsing websites. Instead, they route traffic through residential internet connections and present as ordinary human visitors. This makes it difficult to separate from human traffic, according to
Profound analysts.
In manual tests, some Muse browser sessions triggered a self-identified "meta-webindexer" bot immediately before the human-passing visits. Although requests from these bots
have historically come from IP addresses that were publicly claimed by Meta, these were not.
This explains a shift in the way Meta’s AI web crawler behaves in order to avoid being
recognized and blocked by websites.
In the 20-day period following the launch of Muse, the increase in unverified meta-webindexer requests relative to a 20-day pre-launch baseline was 1.6
times as large on U.S. and Canada websites in comparison to websites elsewhere in the world, according to the analysts.
The findings show how much power Muse has in terms of the products
consumers see and buy.