Every number, and where we got it.
The argument on the front page is that nobody in this market can show you their working. That only counts for something if we can show you ours. Every figure we put in front of you is below, with the document behind it and the date it was true. One of them is our own: The Agent Readability Index, pre-registered, published as data, and re-runnable from a public API.
Sources
Of 946 independent shops we could read, none published a delivery commitment in a form an agent can act on. 95% confidence interval 0% to 0.4%.
Our own primary research, and the only figure on this site we generated rather than cited. 1,165 shops sampled from a frame of 6,989 built from OpenStreetMap, so the sample can be reproduced. 81.2% yielded usable data and the full non-response breakdown is published. Hypotheses were registered and dated before the run. Aggregate only: per-shop findings exist and stay private.
Caravanserai, The Agent Readability Index v1
1 Sep 2026
AI-referred visitors converted 54% higher than non-AI traffic. A year earlier the same panel converted at roughly half the rate of non-AI.
Adobe's own reporting on the same panel is at business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable.
Adobe Analytics
May 2026
AI-driven discovery traffic is less than 1% of Etsy's total site traffic — said on the record, on an earnings call.
Merchants live on ChatGPT Instant Checkout as of February 2026, against the million promised at launch. OpenAI still had no mechanism to collect or remit state sales tax.
Forrester
Feb 2026
In-chat checkout converted at roughly one-third the rate of a plain click through to walmart.com. Walmart measured it and withdrew: “By this time next month, you will not see that experience anymore.”
Daniel Danker, EVP Walmart, at Morgan Stanley TMT
4 Mar 2026
Reported by Wired, CNBC and Search Engine Land
“Crawling and scraping is inadequate to get the full breadth of product data that you need to do a good job of commerce.”
Emily Pfeiffer, Principal Analyst, Forrester
2026
Reported by Modern Retail and Digital Commerce 360
Cloudflare customers blocked 416 billion AI bot requests in the five months after 1 July 2026. From 15 September 2026, Training and Agent crawlers are blocked by default on ad-bearing pages, for new customers, new sites and all existing free customers.
Training and Agent crawlers, on ad-bearing pages. Search crawlers are unaffected, and a storefront carrying no ads is not directly hit.
Cloudflare
Jul–Sep 2026
Shopify's Agentic Storefronts activated by default for eligible US merchants in March 2026, syndicating catalogs to ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Copilot, with checkout redirecting to the merchant's own storefront.
Shopify
Mar 2026
Square launched a ChatGPT app and a Claude plugin on 1 July 2026. US food-and-beverage sellers with an active Square Online Ordering profile were opted in automatically; orders route into Square Online Ordering, the point of sale and the kitchen display; customers pay with Order by Cash App; Square charges no commission. Square is co-developing the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google for local food ordering.
Square's own announcement, carried the same day by Digital Commerce 360. Restaurants only: it does not cover a Square grocer, florist, pharmacy or hardware store, and it does not reach a seller off Square.
Square
1 Jul 2026
OpenAI retired Instant Checkout; Walmart pulled out of the relationship. ChatGPT Atlas was retired four months later.
Fortune
Jun 2026
ACP — Agentic Commerce Protocol, published by Stripe and OpenAI as an open spec.
Stripe
Sept 2025
AP2 — Agent Payments Protocol, published by Google and donated to the FIDO Alliance.
Google Cloud
2025
TAP — Trusted Agent Protocol, published by Visa.
Visa
Oct 2025
x402 — HTTP 402 settlement, from Coinbase and Cloudflare. The x402 Foundation launched under the Linux Foundation in April 2026.
Cloudflare
Apr 2026