Agentic commerce statistics: AI agent purchases quadrupled since April, and about 3% of stores let agents check out

Agentic commerce is shopping done by an AI agent, an assistant that finds a product, fills a cart and, at the far end, pays on a person’s behalf. Buying through agents is growing fast while most stores keep their checkout closed to them. BrightEdge, the search and AI optimization company I work for, says purchases made through AI agents have about quadrupled since April 2026, and that only about 3% of the e-commerce brands it works with let agents complete a transaction.²

The large stores that have opened the door did it in the terms shoppers agree to, and Amazon, Target and Walmart each wrote a different rule. For a store, that rule decides which agents can buy from it and who pays when one gets an order wrong.

About 3% of the e-commerce brands BrightEdge works with let AI agents complete a transaction, while BrightEdge says agent purchases have about quadrupled since April.

How fast are AI agent purchases growing?

AI agent purchases are growing about 43% a month and have roughly quadrupled since April 2026, according to BrightEdge, which gave the figures to The Wall Street Journal for an October 16 story and published them on its own blog.¹² BrightEdge chief executive Jim Yu describes the growth as “fast, from a very small base,” and the post gives rates without the purchase counts behind them, so the figures describe speed and not size.

I calculated that quadrupling over the five or six months since April averages roughly 26% to 32% a month. BrightEdge’s 43% month runs well above that average, so the two rates together say the growth sped up.²

Agent traffic arrived before agent buying. BrightEdge wrote that “In April, AI agent requests reached 88% of human organic search visits across the sites we track.”² Organic search visits are people who arrive by clicking an unpaid search result. So by spring, agents were asking for pages almost as often as people arrived from search, and they were still buying very little.

How many online stores let AI agents complete a purchase?

About 3% of the e-commerce brands BrightEdge works with let AI agents complete a transaction, according to the figures BrightEdge gave the WSJ.¹ Completing a transaction is the furthest step an agent can take. The agent places and pays for the order itself, instead of handing the shopper back to the store’s own checkout.

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller drew the same line in a speech on September 29. He described two models. In the agent-assisted model, “the buyer remains in control. They make the decisions, and they handle the payment.” In the agent-delegated model, “a buyer grants authority to an AI agent to shop and make payments on their behalf.”³

Think of the difference between a friend who texts you a link to a jacket and a friend you hand your card to. The 3% figure BrightEdge reported is about stores that accept the second friend.² A store can turn that friend away and still welcome the first.

The first friend is where Walmart reports good results. Walmart U.S. chief executive David Guggina told Retail Dive that ChatGPT and Gemini “are most often choosing to deep link out to us,” sending shoppers to Walmart’s own pages, “and when they do that, we’re seeing fantastic conversion rates.”⁹

How many shoppers would let an AI agent buy for them?

About one in three shoppers say they would let an AI agent make their purchase decisions, and about one in eight would let it decide where payment is involved, in Accenture’s survey of 25,590 consumers in 16 countries, fielded in January 2026.⁴ These are answers about what people say they would do, and not records of what they bought.

The table below gives Accenture’s figure for each level of hand-over.

What a shopper would let an agent do	Share of respondents	Source
Handle routine tasks	74%	Accenture4
Make purchase decisions	32%	Accenture4
Shop fully on its own	9%	Accenture4
Make purchase decisions autonomously where payment is involved	12%	Accenture4

Accenture calls payments “the highest hurdle.”⁴ Its October holiday survey put a dollar figure on the trust that does exist. Shoppers said a personal agent could spend $102 on gifts without their approval, and active users of generative AI put the figure at $149.⁵

Accenture’s survey and BrightEdge’s store figure measure different people, so the two numbers do not subtract.²⁴ They point the same way, though. Shoppers say they are ready to hand over the decision well before most stores accept a hand-over at checkout.

What do Amazon’s, Target’s and Walmart’s terms say about AI agents?

Amazon, Target and Walmart each added a section on AI agents to the terms a shopper agrees to, and each wrote a different rule. Amazon admits an agent that names itself and leaves when asked. Target admits a named list of four. Walmart admits any agent the customer authorizes, provided the agent also meets Walmart’s own rules for agents.⁶⁷⁸

The table below sets the three rules side by side, from each retailer’s own terms as served on October 28.

Retailer	Terms last updated	Which agents may shop	What the agent must do	Source
Amazon	August 14, 2026	Any agent that identifies itself, unless Amazon has asked it to stay away	Name itself as “Agent/[agent name]” in every request, and never mimic human typing or solve the puzzles that tell people from bots	Amazon6
Target	September 10, 2026	Target’s own assistant, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft, and “All other Agentic Commerce Tools are unauthorized”	Be on Target’s list and be approved by the customer	Target7
Walmart	September 21, 2026	Any agent the customer authorizes that meets Walmart’s separate agent terms	Identify itself as an agent, not hide that it is automated, and stay within Walmart’s rate limits	Walmart8

Amazon’s written rule is narrower than a ban. The WSJ reported that Amazon has taken “a stance against agentic AI, banning Muse and Dots from shopping,” the agents from Meta and OpenAI.¹

The terms themselves let an agent in if it identifies itself “at all times,” and keep it out “if we have requested that the Agent refrain.”⁶ The label goes in the user agent, the name a program sends with each request to say what it is. Amazon’s dispute with Meta over whether Muse identifies itself is covered in the article on Shopify’s signed-agent checkout.

Target’s rule is a guest list. Its terms name “Target’s AI Shopping Assistant, OAI, Google and Microsoft,” and say Target “may add, remove, or otherwise modify the list” at its discretion.⁷ Walmart’s rule starts from the customer. An agent the customer has not authorized, or that has not met Walmart’s “registration and technical requirements,” may have its purchase refused, canceled or reversed.⁸

Walmart’s terms also let it “impose limits on the value, quantity, or frequency” of purchases an agent starts.⁸ Digital Commerce 360 reported on October 23 that Walmart is adding Agent Profiles, which let shoppers “authorize AI agents, set spending limits and track purchases.”¹⁰

Who is responsible when an AI agent buys the wrong thing?

Target’s and Walmart’s terms make the customer responsible for what an authorized agent buys, and Amazon’s agent section does not address it. Target treats those purchases as “transactions authorized by you.” Walmart has the customer promise they had the right to give the agent its permissions, and says it is not responsible for the agent misreading the customer’s instructions.⁷⁸

Governor Waller asked the same question in September. “Who is on the hook if an agent makes the wrong purchase?”³ He framed the change as one of proof, where the question “shifts from proving that a buyer is an authorized payer to proving that an agent has the authority to pay on the buyer’s behalf.”³

The two retailers answered in contract before any shared standard did. Target adds that it “does not purport to guarantee that any Approved Agent will act exactly as you intend in all circumstances.”⁷ Walmart disclaims “any inaccuracy in the Agent’s understanding of your instructions.”⁸ Waller pointed to a different fix, technical standards “designed to give everyone a better understanding of what the buyer intended and how their agent carried it out.”³

A contract settles who pays, and a store still carries the cleanup. The WSJ noted that purchase mistakes “could lead to higher merchandise returns or credit-card chargebacks,” a chargeback being a card payment the bank reverses after the cardholder disputes it.¹

How did I read the retailers’ terms?

I read the shopper terms of the three retailers the WSJ names, Amazon, Target and Walmart, on October 28, 2026. Each page was downloaded whole and its full text searched for agent, agentic, AI, bot, robot, scrape and automated, and every hit was read in context. Mentions of a legal or copyright agent were set aside. Each page states the date it was last updated, which is the date in the table.⁶⁷⁸

Three retailers show how three large stores chose, and they say nothing about how common a written agent rule is across e-commerce. Terms also record what a store permits on paper. Whether its site lets the same agents through is a separate setting, which the article on retailers blocking agents covers.

What should a store do about AI agent checkout?

A store deciding on AI agent checkout should choose which of the three rules it wants, write that rule into its terms, and make sure its site lets the same agents through. Amazon, Target and Walmart show the three choices, which are any agent that names itself, a named list, or any agent the customer authorizes. Each choice puts different work on the store.

1. Choose the rule. A named list is the easiest to police, and it shuts out every agent that is not on it. An identify-yourself rule admits more agents, and it depends on checking who is asking.
2. Write who pays. Target’s and Walmart’s sentences on authorized purchases are the two models on record, and the wording for your store is a question for your own counsel.
3. Check that the site agrees with the terms. A defense built against scrapers can block an agent the terms allow, a gap covered in the article on retailers blocking agents.
4. Count agent orders on their own. Walmart’s Agent Profiles separate an agent’s purchases from the shopper’s, and a store that cannot tell the two apart cannot see the growth BrightEdge describes in its own numbers.

Until a shared standard answers Waller’s question, a store’s own terms are where it gets answered, so the agent section deserves the review a checkout change would get. For the route where Google’s agent hands the cart back before payment, see the article on Google’s Universal Cart.