About this site

How Agents Shop is a weekly read on AI shopping agents and the sites they're trying to use.

Each issue covers two things: what happened in agentic commerce that week, and what our own agents ran into.

The research

Every day we send AI shopping agents to large consumer sites across autos, real estate, resale and home services. Same sort of agent ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini use when someone asks them to go shopping.

We check three things. Can the agent get in. How far does it get. Does it come back with something a person could actually use.

It's been running daily since June 2026.

A few notes on how we do it, because they change how much weight any single number deserves.

Every site gets two separate readings that we keep apart: what it says about agent access, and what happened when an agent turned up. Those two disagree more often than you'd expect.

We count a wall aimed at agents in general apart from one that caught our particular agent. Those are different problems with different fixes, and blending them would make both look worse than they are.

We report by category rather than by company. The findings are about patterns, not about singling anyone out.

When a reading is new, we say so, and we take it again the following week before treating it as settled.

Who's behind it

kya labs. We build measurement for agentic commerce, and How Agents Shop is where we publish what that measurement turns up.

Your own site

The newsletter covers our panel of sites with the names taken out. If you want these measurements run on your own domain, named, every week, that's a paid subscription from $79 a month. Reply to any issue and we'll set it up.

Get in touch

Reply to any issue, or write to chris@kyalabs.io. We read everything.