Are AI agents already buying from your store? Most now use your normal checkout
Some already are, and most of them go through your normal checkout. In Forter’s merchant network, AI agents that browse a store and fill in its own checkout pages, the way a person would, placed 70% of agent orders in the week of 12 October, up from 1% in late July. Agent orders overall are now roughly five times their level in the first week Forter tracked. Your product pages and checkout need to work for a software visitor as well as for people.
- Forter’s data covers AI agent orders on its merchant network from 23 July to 20 October 2026, mostly in North America.
- Agents that drive the store’s own checkout pages went from 1% of agent orders in late July to 70% in the week of 12 October.
- Forter began detecting Meta’s Muse on 21 September. That week, agent orders were up 229% month on month, and all agent orders are now roughly five times their level in the first week of the data.
- Muse bought at 74% of the stores that received any agent order. ChatGPT Agent bought at 45%, nearly double OpenAI’s checkout protocol.
- The average agent order was $226, and orders between $50 and $200 were the most common.
What happened
On 23 October, fraud-prevention company Forter published AI agent order data from its merchant network. The big change came after Meta launched its Muse shopping agent. Since then, agents that browse a store like a person have overtaken checkout protocols, the direct connections that stores have to build for agents. Forter’s explanation is simple: browsing agents “can shop anywhere, while the protocols can only reach those stores that have integrated them.”
These figures come from one company’s network, so read them as a strong signal, not a count of the whole market.
What this means for your site or store
If an agent can’t read your product page or get through your checkout, it can’t buy from you, and the shopper may never find out why.
- Put price, stock, sizes, delivery costs and your returns policy in plain text on the product page, not only in images or pop-ups.
- Test your checkout step by step: guest checkout, clearly labelled fields, and no step that only works with a hover or a pop-up.
- Ask your payment or fraud provider how it treats agent orders, so a real customer’s agent isn’t blocked by default.
- Keep product details the same on your site and in any feeds you send to shopping channels.
For the big-retailer side of this shift, see what Walmart’s Agent Gateway means for sellers.
The technical details
Forter splits agent orders in two. Protocol orders come through commerce protocols such as OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which a store has to integrate. Browsing agents such as Muse and ChatGPT Agent load your pages and fill in your forms instead. For them, real text rather than text inside images, and structured data (schema.org markup that labels price, availability and product details), make your pages easier to read. Protocols and standards such as MCP (a standard way for AI agents to use a website’s tools) are a longer-term route, but in Forter’s data most agent orders now arrive through the normal checkout.
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