The AI Commerce Wars Have Begun

Amazon, Google, Walmart, OpenAI, and Shopify are racing to build AI assistants that can shop for you — while blocking rivals from touching their data. The winner will own the customer relationship; the loser will be reduced to a warehouse.

For decades, the e-commerce playbook was simple: own the traffic, own the customer. Search engines, marketplaces, and retailers fought to be the first click in a shopper’s journey and the last click before checkout.

Now, a new battleground has emerged — agentic shopping — and the stakes are exponentially higher. AI agents aren’t just recommending products; they’re making the purchase for you, across sites, without you ever opening a browser or tapping an app. The platform that controls your shopping agent controls your entire commerce relationship — discovery, decision, payment, and loyalty.

Every major player wants to win that prize. And no one wants to be reduced to a nameless fulfillment partner in someone else’s ecosystem.

The Tension: Agentic Potential vs. Disintermediation Risk

Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, Apple, Walmart, and Shopify all see the promise: an AI agent that knows your preferences, compares every option, and gets you the right product instantly.

But here’s the catch — to deliver on that vision, an agent needs access to every retailer’s product, price, and inventory data. And once you give another platform that access, you risk losing the customer relationship entirely.

That’s why the first phase of the AI commerce wars has been defined less by mass adoption — and more by defensive moves to block competitors from building better agents.

Flashpoint: Amazon vs. Google’s Shopping AI

The most visible skirmish came when Amazon not only blocked Google’s Mariner shopping bot from crawling its site but also pulled all of its shopping ads from Google.

It’s a blunt message: “We’re not going to feed our competitors’ AI engines, and we’re not going to fund their ad ecosystem either.”

For Amazon, it’s part of a broader defensive perimeter — blocking Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude from scraping the site, while building its own agentic capabilities like Rufus (a generative shopping assistant) and the new Buy for Me feature, which can purchase items from other retailers without you leaving the Amazon app.

Everyone’s Playing Both Defense and Offense

The last 18 months have seen a flurry of moves:

• Shopify has updated its terms of service to require a human in the transaction loop, while also rolling out the infrastructure for its own agent-driven marketplace, aggregating millions of merchants into a universal cart and checkout experience.
• Walmart has unveiled a four-agent architecture (customer, associate, partner, and developer) and staffed up senior AI leadership to execute.
• OpenAI has launched Shopping in ChatGPT and previewed Operator, a browser-driving agent that can complete transactions across the open web, led by former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.
• Google has added “AI Mode” to Search, tying shopping results directly to its Shopping Graph and experimenting with agentic checkout.
• Perplexity has introduced Buy with Pro for instant purchasing and released Comet, an AI-first mobile browser.
• Apple is embedding AI agents into iOS and macOS via Apple Intelligence and a re-engineered Siri, while Microsoft is doing the same with Windows and Edge.

Why Blocking Is Just the First Phase

Legacy bot controls like robots.txt were designed for a different era. Retailers are now moving to server-side blocks, CDN-level defenses (Cloudflare’s AI bot controls), and legal agreements to limit unauthorized crawling.

The next phase will be about controlled access — giving “friendly” agents permission via secure APIs or new interoperability standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which Shopify, Anthropic, and Microsoft are already embracing.

In other words, the war will shift from blocking to brokering.

The Endgame: Walled Gardens With Super Agents

No retailer or marketplace wants its data powering a rival’s AI agent. The logical outcome?

• Amazon will let Rufus — and only Rufus — be the trusted interpreter of Amazon’s catalog.
• Google will keep its Shopping Graph proprietary, feeding only its Gemini-powered agents.
• Walmart will embed its four agents deep into its app, website, and in-store systems.
• Shopify will create an agent-friendly environment for its marketplace while keeping others out.

The winner isn’t just the one with the best AI — it’s the one with the most complete, exclusive view of customer preferences and the tightest control over the purchase journey.

The Collateral Damage

The shift to agentic shopping has massive implications:

• Retail media networks could see less traffic if agents complete transactions without sending users to retailer sites.
• Affiliate marketing and publisher commerce content could lose relevance if agents bypass their links entirely.
• Attribution models will break when one agent consults multiple data sources before transacting.

What Leaders Should Do Now

If you run a retailer, brand, or marketplace, the decisions you make in the next 12 months will determine whether you control your agentic destiny — or become just another fulfillment node in someone else’s AI-powered supply chain.

1. Set your agent access policy now — decide who gets API keys, and how much data they can touch.
2. Invest in your own on-site agent to keep your customers engaged within your environment.
3. Structure your product data so it’s agent-ready — rich attributes, real-time inventory, and frictionless checkout hooks.
4. Prepare for new attribution models — work with payment providers and data partners to maintain visibility when agents are in the loop.

The War Is Just Starting

What we’re witnessing now is the early trench warfare of a much bigger campaign. The era of agentic shopping will reorder the power dynamics of global commerce just as search did in the 2000s and marketplaces did in the 2010s.

The difference this time? The journey won’t start with a click. It’ll start with a conversation — and whichever agent you trust to handle it will own your shopping future.