Your AI Can Book and Buy, Until the Website Locks the Door

Hand a restaurant booking or a shopping errand to an AI, and it may never make it past the website’s front door. On October 17, The Verge reported that personal AI agents were being blocked from completing tasks on multiple websites. The story is about services built around AI that acts on your behalf, running into access limits on the real web.

Which sites are shutting the door

Yelp says it does not permit automated access by anyone who has not signed a content and data licensing agreement. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab both confirmed that they block AI agents from accessing accounts, citing security. The rationale, and the scope of what gets blocked, varies from site to site.

Beyond policies a site writes for itself, the bot defenses that have been in place for years can also stop an AI in its tracks. Cloudflare’s AI crawler blocking feature, as the company describes it, is aimed mainly at traffic that scrapes content or harvests it for training. Reports of tasks failing on Cars.com and Amtrak came from users posting their own experiences.

Why Amazon and Perplexity clashed

Friction between user-side AI and site operators is not new. Amazon said in November 2025 that it had repeatedly asked Perplexity to remove Amazon from Comet. Its position: a service that shops on someone’s behalf should identify itself, and should respect a site operator’s right to decide whether to participate at all.

Perplexity pushed back, calling the move an unfair restriction on agents acting for users. The two sides disagree over how far an AI working on a user’s behalf should be allowed to go. For anyone handing bookings and purchases to an AI, the dispute is an immediate practical problem: you can kick off a task inside an AI service and still have it stall partway through because the destination site has locked access.

The AI checkout lane merchants open themselves

Shopify runs “Agentic Storefronts,” which lets merchants feed product information to AI channels and carry the interaction all the way through to purchase. It is on by default for stores that meet the requirements, and merchants can adjust which channels they participate in from the admin dashboard. Rather than having an AI poke at a website’s interface on its own, the approach connects products and checkout through a path the merchant has deliberately opened.

For readers in Korea, there is one more thing to check: whether the AI service you want to use is even available in your region. Meta’s Muse, which came up in these cases, was described by Meta at the time as available in the United States, Canada and Mexico. That is why you have to verify two things separately: the AI service you plan to use, and the site you plan to send it to.

In the end, what matters when you delegate a task to an AI is the range of places it can actually reach and act. Two trends are unfolding at once: sites closing their doors, and merchants opening dedicated AI purchase lanes. What to watch next is the conditions each site sets for allowing AI activity, and how those conditions reshape the bookings and purchases users can hand off in the first place.