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The Door · agent commerce, one take at a time

Agents are arriving. Own your surface.

Your surface is where agents arrive, what they’re allowed to do, and the record of what they did. The Door tracks what moved there: a short take on weekdays, each tagged with the layer it hits and the Know Your Agent question it touches, and an email every two weeks on what to do about it.

Get The Door → Read the issues Can an agent buy from you? ↗

How to read it

Five layers. Four questions.

Every take names which layer of your surface it touches, from what agents hear about you down to the system that makes the final decision. It also names which KYA question it moves: who the agent is (Q1), who authorized it (Q2), what it may do (Q3), and how far that authority travels (Q4). The first three are converging. The fourth is open.

The four questions are laid out in the Know Your Agent library. The surface argument in full: Own Your Surface ↗

01 · ReputationWhat agents hear

Q3

Apple opens Siri AI to every app, and Siri picks which one to ask

Apple’s 27.3 betas let any app declare actions Siri AI can carry out, from checking a delivery to booking a reservation to placing an order, and Siri can often choose the app without the customer naming it; apps can ship these integrations once App Store submissions open in the spring.

Your doorUse the time to write down what an agent may do in your app, which steps need the customer to confirm, and how your systems will record that Siri, not the customer, made the request.

Macworld · Nov 4 · Permalink
Q3

OpenAI’s site-safety check can keep ChatGPT’s browsing tools off a store

OpenAI runs a central site-safety check, called Aura, that can stop ChatGPT and Codex browsing from opening a flagged site regardless of robots.txt, and blocked visits often leave nothing in the site’s own logs.

Your doorTest whether ChatGPT can reach your product and checkout pages alongside a few peer sites, after ruling out your own bot and WAF rules, so you know whether a missing agent was stopped at their gate or yours.

Search Engine Journal · Oct 29 · Permalink

02 · LegibilityWhat agents can read

Q3

Nine in ten stores with a valid UCP profile run on Shopify or Wix

UCP Checker’s October 30 census found more than 19,000 stores publishing a valid Universal Commerce Protocol profile, about 92% of them on Shopify or Wix, and only 58% declaring that agents can place an order rather than just search and fill a cart.

Your doorIf you sell on another platform, check whether your store publishes a profile at all and declares order, and run PegasusKYA to see whether an agent can actually complete a purchase at your door.

UCP Checker · Oct 30 · Permalink
Q3

Google says UCP checkout now reaches hundreds of thousands of brands

On its earnings call, Google said its Universal Commerce Protocol now supports direct checkout for hundreds of thousands of brands, paired with the Agent Payments Protocol and a new Universal Cart.

Your doorMerchants on any platform should make sure their product data, prices, stock and return terms are complete enough for an agent to read and act on, because that data decides whether an agent can finish a purchase at their door.

PYMNTS · Oct 28 · Permalink
Q3

AI chat now shapes more purchases than retailers’ own sites, McKinsey finds

McKinsey’s survey of about 21,000 consumers in 11 markets found AI chat and search tools were the biggest influence on the latest purchase for 29% of AI shoppers, and the share of US adults buying through AI has roughly doubled since December to 9%.

Your doorMake sure agents can read your catalog, prices and return terms as structured data, and decide on purpose which authorized agents may complete checkout at your door rather than leaving it to defaults.

Retail Technology Innovation Hub · Oct 28 · Permalink
Q3

BigCommerce stores now open to browser agents by default

Commerce switched on WebMCP, an early-preview browser standard, for eligible BigCommerce merchants, so an agent in a shopper’s browser can search the catalog, fill a cart and hand back a checkout link while checkout itself stays on the store.

Your doorIf you sell on BigCommerce, open the new AI settings and choose on purpose whether to stay in; on any other platform, treat it as a sign that agent-readable catalogs are becoming a default, and map which product, price and cart actions you would expose to agents yourself.

GlobeNewswire (via FinancialContent) · Oct 21 · Permalink

03 · EdgeWho gets in

Q2

Hong Kong’s bank regulator starts work on checking an agent’s identity and delegated authority

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority launched Project SAGE on November 2 with an industry expert group to explore how to verify an AI agent’s identity and the authority delegated to it, with agentic commerce among the use cases and no new rules yet.

Your doorMerchants should treat who the agent is and who authorized it as two separate checks at their door and log both on every agent order, so any Know Your Agent standard that emerges fits a record they already keep.

Hong Kong Monetary Authority · Nov 2 · Permalink
Q3

Commerce gets nearly half of AI bot traffic, and mostly just watches it

Akamai’s network data puts commerce at nearly half of all AI bot traffic, yet commerce sites left more than 90% of that activity in monitor-only mode and most of the rest unrestricted.

Your doorSet separate rules for browsing, login and checkout, keep the catalog open, and grant checkout exceptions only to agents that prove who they are with a registered key rather than a name in a header; a free PegasusKYA check shows how your door treats a verified agent today.

Akamai · Oct 26 · Permalink
Q1

Know Your Agent is still competing schemes, not one standard

Heading into Money20/20, the card networks, Google’s AP2 (now at the FIDO Alliance) and an IETF draft each prove an agent’s identity and authority a different way, and none has become the standard.

Your doorVerify agents at one gateway in front of your store and order systems, so the scheme can change without rebuilding what sits behind it.

Yahoo Finance (Forkast) · Oct 18 · Permalink
Q2

Big banks are locking credentialed AI agents out of customer accounts

JPMorgan now blocks outside AI agents that log in with a customer’s own credentials, allowing read-only views through authorized connectors at most, because it can’t tell a customer-sanctioned agent from a rogue one, and other large banks are following.

Your doorMerchants face the same question at checkout, so decide now whether an agent arriving with a shopper’s login is treated as the shopper, and start recognizing agents that present a verifiable signature instead.

PYMNTS · Oct 14 · Permalink
Q3

Williams-Sonoma’s new terms bar AI shopping agents without written consent

Williams-Sonoma rewrote its terms so no agent may shop or use a customer account without the company’s written permission, even when the customer authorized it, and every automated tool must identify itself.

Your doorSet your own agent policy at the door now, in your terms and in code, and log which agents you let through to an order.

KQED · Oct 13 · Permalink
Q1

The captcha asked the wrong question

A consumer agent hit a captcha while cancelling an order, asked its user for standing permission to solve captchas, then failed; the gate could only ask whether a human was present.

Your doorFind every place your site asks "are you human?" before a binding act, because each one is a door closing on legitimate customers.

WIRED · Oct 7 · Permalink
Q1

Agents at the door, turned away

Personal agents are being blocked across retail, travel and local-business sites by human checks, terms-of-service bans and paid walls, some of it unintended.

Your doorDecide on purpose: if you block agents, make it a choice and not a side effect of your bot settings.

TechCrunch · Oct 6 · Permalink
Q3

Retailers split on how wide to open

Some retailers keep agents out of their own checkouts while others let them buy and send their catalogs to the agent platforms.

Your doorBlock, allowlist and open each have a cost, so price all three before you choose.

PYMNTS · Oct 5 · Permalink

04 · MembraneWhat it may do

Q2

Equifax warns holiday agent orders will slip past behavior-based fraud checks

Equifax says AI shopping agents don’t produce the mouse movement and typing patterns many fraud tools score, and expects agent mistakes such as forgotten reorders and wrong quantities to come back as January chargebacks.

Your doorScore agent orders on device, network and credential signals rather than behavior, record what each agent was authorized to buy, and have dispute handling ready before holiday statements land.

Equifax · Nov 3 · Permalink
Q3

Natural lets business agents pick ACH, wire or instant rails on their own

Natural’s new Direct product lets a business’s AI agents choose between ACH, wire and real-time rails at the moment of payment, with each agent holding its own keys and spending limits.

Your doorB2B sellers should expect agents to start paying their invoices, so publish remittance details and terms through one verified channel that an agent can read and a spoofed email can’t override.

PR Newswire · Oct 29 · Permalink
Q3

Visa describes its agent token as a credential with the limits built in

On its earnings call this week, Visa agreed its agentic token is a network token scoped to a time window, a merchant category, a dollar cap and the shopper’s stated intent, and said it is readying issuers and acquirers to process them while agent volume stays very small.

Your doorAsk your acquirer when those tokens and their decline reasons will reach you, and keep the agent’s identity, the order and the authorization result in one record so a scoped decline or dispute can be traced.

The Motley Fool (Visa Q4 FY2026 earnings call transcript) · Oct 28 · Permalink
Q3

The RealReal tightens agent checkout after bots tied up held carts

The RealReal is making it harder for AI agents to log in, fill carts and check out after reporters showed agents could use its 20-minute cart hold to lock up items for hours.

Your doorReview every feature that reserves inventory or price for a shopper, and give agent sessions their own hold limits and expiry so one agent can’t do at scale what a person does once.

Gizmodo · Oct 27 · Permalink
Q2

Shopify’s agent checkout treats a verified signature as identity, not permission

Shopify’s developer docs for Checkout WebMCP let browser agents read and fill a live checkout, identified by Web Bot Auth signed requests, but they cannot enter new card numbers and must show the buyer the order and total and get a yes before placing it, and ask again if the total changes.

Your doorWhatever platform you run, draw the same line at your own checkout: let verified agents prepare the order, require a fresh buyer confirmation to place it, and record that confirmation with the order.

Shopify developer docs · Oct 27 · Permalink
Q3

Walmart writes house rules for shopping agents

Walmart opened an invitation-only gateway for third-party shopping agents and published agent terms: verified identity, purchases approved by the shopper or held under a cap they set, no access to card data, and a block for agents that act beyond the buyer’s intent.

Your doorYou don’t need Walmart’s scale to do the same at your own door: write down what agents may do on your site, require a person’s approval or a spending cap before an agent can buy, and decide now what happens to an agent that oversteps.

ActuIA · Oct 22 · Permalink
Q3

Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines caps agent spend with signed vouchers

Mastercard is rolling out Agent Pay for Machines on the x402 protocol: an agent that gets a 402 Payment Required signs a voucher carrying a human-approved spending limit, and the provider redeems it later.

Your doorThat is authority kept as a record, not a login, so any business letting agents buy should set a per-agent ceiling by a person and reconcile every voucher back to it.

PaymentExpert · Oct 21 · Permalink

05 · CoreWhere it’s decided

Q1

Mid-market merchants mostly can’t tie an AI-referred visit to the order

A PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 60 U.S. merchants with $50 million to $1 billion in revenue found 37% spot visits from AI platforms but lose track of them before purchase, and another 12% can’t tell agent traffic from human traffic at all.

Your doorTag each arrival with what it says it is and whether its signature checks out, then carry that tag through cart and order so your records show which agents actually turn into sales.

PYMNTS · Nov 3 · Permalink
Q1

DoorDash says outside AI agents have placed only several hundred orders

DoorDash’s CEO said on the Q3 call that third-party agents have sent maybe several hundred orders in total, against about 3 million deliveries a day, while the company stays open to agent makers and runs its own connector.

Your doorMerchants should read that as an early level, not the slope, and use the quiet period to tag agent orders separately so they can see who is arriving and what each agent did before volume grows.

TechCrunch · Oct 30 · Permalink
Q4

No one has written the liability rules for agent purchases yet

Bank, network and payments executives say liability for agent purchases still rests on company-by-company policies, with no industry rules or case law, while Visa and Mastercard take different routes to recognize agents.

Your doorUntil rules settle, a merchant’s best defense is its own record: log which agent arrived, what credential and intent it carried, and what your system allowed, so a disputed order can be answered from facts.

Payments Dive · Oct 28 · Permalink
Q2

Agent checkout reaches TV and lock-screen shopping surfaces

PayPal is now the native checkout inside Glance’s AI shopping surfaces on smart TVs and phone lock screens, and nobody has yet settled who pays when an agent buys the wrong thing.

Your doorFlag agent-originated orders and keep the buyer’s mandate with the order in your system of record before the returns and disputes arrive.

Yahoo Finance · Oct 17 · Permalink
Q2

Amex publishes an open spec that binds agent purchases to approved intent

American Express released its Intent Intelligence Framework: the shopper approves a scoped intent, the agent gets a payment token tied to it, and off-intent purchases can be declined before they clear.

Your doorPlan to store the intent ID with the order in your system of record, because it is the evidence that a person committed to that purchase.

TechCrunch · Oct 13 · Permalink

For what a decision at the system of record looks like running end to end, see the Silver Lake proof.

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One email every two weeks: the takes that mattered, which question moved, and what to do at your own door. Three minutes to read.

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Each take states its source and how much weight it can bear. The layer and question tags are our reading of the field, not claims made by the sources. Pegasus Source is independent of the companies covered here.