Amazon's Walled Garden Strategy for AI Shopping

On March 9, a federal judge blocked Perplexity's Comet browser from accessing Amazon — Judge Maxine Chesney in the Northern District of California found "strong evidence" of unauthorized access under the CFAA. Perplexity got a 7-day stay to appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Deadline: March 16.

TL;DR: Amazon controls $830 billion in GMV and blocks every external AI agent while building its own — Rufus at 250-300 million users with a $10 billion revenue run rate (About Amazon, 2025). The rest of ecommerce can join open protocols like UCP, or accept Amazon as the default AI shopping layer. There's no third option.

That ruling isn't just about one browser. It answers a question that's been hanging over agentic commerce since I started investigating how AI agents actually shop: can a platform lock AI agents out?

Amazon's answer: yes. And not just legally — structurally, technically, and commercially. While everyone else debates open protocols, Amazon already built the walls. Here's what I found when I dug into how tall those walls actually are.

What Does Amazon Actually Control?

Amazon processed $830 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025 (Marketplace Pulse, 2025). That number alone explains the strategy. With 9.7 million registered sellers (SalesDuo, 2026), 240 million Prime members globally (Thunderbit, 2025), and 13 billion items delivered same or next-day last year (PYMNTS, 2025), Amazon doesn't need to negotiate with external AI platforms. It already is the platform.

I tried mapping the full stack on a whiteboard. Rufus handles product discovery — 250-300 million customers have used it (About Amazon, 2025), with monthly active users up 149% year-over-year. The marketplace provides supply. Amazon Pay handles money. FBA handles fulfillment. And the piece that locks the whole thing together: advertising, at $68.6 billion in 2025 (eMarketer, 2025).

I couldn't find a single layer that requires an external partner. In my previous post on China's agentic commerce, I noted that Alibaba runs the exact same playbook — own the chatbot, the marketplace, the payment rail. Amazon doesn't need to worry about interoperability because there's nothing to interoperate with.

Why Did Amazon Block Every External AI Agent?

I checked Amazon's robots.txt myself. "ChatGPT-User" and "OAI-SearchBot" — both blocked since November 2025, according to Modern Retail. ChatGPT referral traffic to Amazon fell 18% as a result (eMarketer, 2025). Google's AI agents got the same treatment.

Why would a retailer block free traffic? I kept turning this over.

The answer is $68.6 billion. Amazon's ad business generated $17.7 billion in Q4 2025 alone — up 24% year-over-year (PPC Land, 2026). When an AI agent shops for a user, it skips the sponsored listings entirely. According to Practical Ecommerce, agents "skip to an item and initiate checkout" — the end customer never visits the site. That threatens $38 billion in US retail media search ad spend (Digiday, 2025). Amazon controls roughly 60% of that market.

Here's what that means in practice: Amazon isn't anti-AI-shopping. It's anti-anyone-else's-AI-shopping. Rufus gets full access to every product listing, every review, every purchase history signal. External agents get a locked door.

Andy Jassy made the logic explicit in Q4 2025: "Many customers will choose to use first-party AI shopping agents over third-party 'horizontal' agents," he told Retail Brew. His critique of external agents was blunt — "There's no personalization, there's no shopping history, the delivery estimates are frequently wrong, the prices are often wrong."

He's not entirely wrong — I tested Perplexity's shopping agent before the injunction, and the delivery estimates were frequently off by 2-3 days versus Amazon's own predictions. Third-party agents do lack purchase history and delivery precision. But framing that as a reason to block rather than a problem to solve through open data sharing tells you what the real priority is. The $68.6 billion ad business doesn't protect itself.

How Does Rufus Compare to Open Protocol Shopping?

Amazon's Rufus assistant is already one of the largest AI shopping tools in existence. Between 250 and 300 million customers have used it, according to About Amazon (2025). Interactions grew 210% year-over-year. During Black Friday 2025, Rufus sessions saw a 3.5x conversion rate compared to non-Rufus sessions (Omise AI, 2025).

That conversion number deserves a closer look. Rufus users are 60% more likely to complete a purchase than shoppers who don't use it, according to Yahoo Finance (2025). Andy Jassy disclosed a $10 billion annual revenue run rate on the Q3 2025 earnings call. And in October 2025, Amazon launched "Help Me Decide" — a feature that recommends products based on a shopper's full purchase history, not just the current search.

The UCP coalition, by contrast, has 20-plus partners including Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Macy's, and Visa. It's the open standard backed by Google and Shopify. But here's the tension: no UCP agent has access to what Rufus has. No external agent knows what you bought last month, what you returned, or when your Prime delivery window opens. The data advantage is structural.

I kept coming back to a question while researching this: is Rufus actually better, or is it just operating on a playing field nobody else can access? I tried asking Perplexity and ChatGPT to recommend running shoes while logged into Amazon with Rufus open on another tab. Rufus knew my size, my brand history, my Prime delivery window. The external agents had none of that. The conversion data is real — but it's real partly because Rufus has an information advantage that no open protocol can match without Amazon's cooperation.

Then there's Alexa+. Amazon rolled it out nationwide on February 4, 2026 (CNBC, 2026). Free for Prime members, $19.99/month standalone. The critical feature: autonomous purchasing. Alexa+ can auto-buy when price targets hit, with no confirmation required. Shopping frequency on Alexa+ is 3x the previous version, across 600 million Alexa devices globally.

What Is Buy for Me Really Doing?

While Rufus keeps shoppers inside Amazon, a newer tool pushes Amazon's reach outward. Shop Direct — initially called "Buy for Me" — gives Amazon's AI agent access to over 100 million products from more than 400,000 merchants, according to About Amazon (March 11, 2026). Merchants can submit product feeds through datafeed partners like Feedonomics, Salsify, and CEDCommerce.

But not everyone opted in.

According to CNBC (January 2026), 180-plus businesses reported finding their products listed inside the program without consent. One Bobo Design Studio owner told CNBC: "My site, along with countless others are being scraped." Amazon's response was an opt-out email: branddirect@amazon.com. A self-service merchant portal is reportedly coming.

The hypocrisy is hard to ignore. Amazon sued Perplexity for scraping Amazon product pages. Then built a tool that scrapes independent merchant sites to populate an Amazon shopping experience. Perplexity scraping Amazon? Lawsuit. Amazon scraping small retailers? Product feature.

And with the Perplexity v. Amazon injunction from March 9-10, Amazon now has case law on its side. Judge Chesney ruled that platform authorization matters — a user giving an AI agent permission to browse isn't enough. The platform itself must also authorize the agent. If that reasoning holds on appeal (Ninth Circuit deadline: March 16), it hands Amazon a legal framework to permanently exclude external agents while freely extending its own reach into other merchants' sites.

Is Amazon's Closed Strategy Actually Working?

Amazon's biggest competitor in US retail chose the opposite approach. Walmart joined UCP, partnered with both Google and OpenAI, and has been vocal about it. Walmart EVP Hari Vasudev told Modern Retail: "That approach of open partnerships is something that we strongly believe in."

The early numbers back it up. Walmart's AI assistant Sparky helps customers build 35% bigger baskets, according to Modern Retail. Roughly half of Walmart's app users have tried it.

So which approach wins? The honest answer: I don't know yet. Amazon's walled garden generates $10 billion a year from Rufus alone, with a 3.5x Black Friday conversion lift. Walmart's open approach grows basket sizes 35% and plugs into every external AI agent — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity can all route orders to Walmart. Amazon protects its $68.6 billion ad business by keeping agents out. Walmart can afford openness because its ad business is smaller and it has less to lose from agent bypass.

Meanwhile, Amazon is quietly playing both sides through AWS. Bedrock AgentCore offers serverless hosting for AI agents and MCP servers. Visa built its Intelligent Commerce payment workflows on it. According to Gartner, 40% of enterprise applications will integrate AI agents by end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025. Amazon is happy to sell the infrastructure for open AI commerce — it just won't let those agents shop on Amazon.com.

What Does This Mean for Everyone Outside Amazon?

For the 9.7 million sellers on Amazon's marketplace, the path is already set. Rufus sells for you. Alexa+ sells for you. Your job is product quality, pricing, and Amazon's ad flywheel. Nothing changes — which is both the comfort and the trap.

For merchants outside Amazon, the choice is more complicated. The open protocols — UCP, ACP — represent the alternative. McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could hit $1 trillion in US retail by 2030. Morgan Stanley projects roughly 50% of American shoppers will use AI agents by then. That's an enormous market forming outside Amazon's walls.

But it's forming slowly. And in the gap, Amazon launched Shop Direct — bringing 400,000 merchants inside its ecosystem whether they chose it or not. The legal precedent from the Perplexity injunction makes this asymmetry harder to challenge.

Here's what keeps bugging me about the whole picture. Amazon doesn't need to win the protocol war. It doesn't need UCP or ACP. It just needs external agents to remain worse than Rufus — worse data, worse delivery estimates, worse personalization. As long as the infrastructure gap stays open, Amazon's walled garden looks less like a prison and more like a luxury hotel.

FAQ

Does Amazon support UCP or ACP protocols?

No. Amazon is absent from both major agentic commerce protocols. UCP, backed by Google and Shopify, has 20-plus partners including Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Macy's, and Visa. ACP, backed by OpenAI and Stripe, also excludes Amazon. Instead, Amazon built its own closed AI shopping tools — Rufus, Alexa+, and Shop Direct — that operate entirely within its ecosystem.

Why did Amazon block AI agents from crawling its site?

Amazon added ChatGPT and Perplexity crawlers to its robots.txt in November 2025. The primary motivation appears to be ad revenue protection. Amazon's advertising business generated $68.6 billion in 2025 (eMarketer, 2025). AI agents bypass sponsored product listings entirely — when an agent shops for a user, no one sees the ads. That threatens Amazon's fastest-growing revenue stream.

How does the Perplexity v. Amazon ruling affect AI shopping?

Judge Maxine Chesney's March 2026 preliminary injunction blocked Perplexity's Comet browser from accessing password-protected Amazon sections under the CFAA. The key precedent: a platform must authorize the AI agent, not just the user. This potentially gives any major retailer legal grounds to block external AI shopping agents. Perplexity is appealing to the Ninth Circuit with a March 16 deadline.

Can merchants opt out of Amazon's Shop Direct?

Yes, but only through an opt-out process. According to CNBC (January 2026), 180-plus merchants found their products listed in Shop Direct without consent. Amazon's current opt-out method is emailing branddirect@amazon.com. A self-service merchant portal is reportedly in development. The default is opt-in — your products may already be listed.

Is Walmart's open approach better than Amazon's closed one?

They solve different problems. Walmart's open approach — joining UCP, partnering with Google and OpenAI — produces 35% bigger baskets through its Sparky AI assistant (Modern Retail). Amazon's closed approach generates $10 billion annually through Rufus with 3.5x Black Friday conversion rates. Walmart can afford openness because its ad business is smaller. Amazon's $68.6 billion in ad revenue creates a structural incentive to keep agents out.

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Conclusion

Amazon's walled garden isn't a temporary position — it's a strategy backed by $830 billion in GMV, $68.6 billion in ad revenue, and now federal case law. The walls are structural, not ideological.

But the rest of ecommerce doesn't have to accept it. Open protocols exist, Walmart is proving the alternative works, and McKinsey projects a $1 trillion agentic commerce market by 2030 — far more than any single company can capture.

The question isn't whether Amazon's walled garden will hold. It's whether everything outside those walls can organize fast enough to matter before Amazon's Shop Direct absorbs them anyway. The Perplexity appeal lands at the Ninth Circuit on March 16 — and that ruling could reshape who gets to build AI shopping and who gets locked out.

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Part 4 of "The Agentic Commerce Investigation" series. Previously: Which Ecommerce Stores Show Up When AI Goes Shopping?, The Agentic Commerce Infrastructure Gap, China Is Already Living in the Agentic Commerce Future.