PegasusThe gate asked the wrong question. Agents are arriving at your door.
Welcome to The Door. Every two weeks: where agent commerce stands, and what to do about it at your own business. One idea runs through all of it: own your surface. That means where agents arrive, what they're allowed to do, and the record of what they did.
01 · The lead
The gate asked the wrong question
A reviewer sent a new consumer agent to cancel an order. It hit a captcha and asked its user for standing permission to solve captchas, then failed the puzzle. The order stayed open. (WIRED. One reviewer's test: a specimen, not a measurement.)
The same week, a roundup found personal agents being blocked across retail, travel and local-business sites by human checks, terms-of-service bans and paid walls, some of it unintended. (TechCrunch. Some claims anecdotal.)
What it changes for a merchant
Your gate was built to ask whether a human is present. The customer behind an agent is real, and the gate turns them away anyway. Nothing in the exchange tells you who the agent is, who it works for, or what it's allowed to do. Blocking agents should be a decision you make, not a side effect of your bot settings. What block, allowlist and open each cost →
02 · The four questions
Three converging, one open
Q1Who is the agent?converging
Meta and Sierra proposed a Personal Agent Protocol for how personal agents deal with businesses. How an agent proves who it represents isn't spelled out yet. (Sierra, spec pending.)
Q2Who authorized it?converging
Mastercard began US testing of a score that tells issuers how likely a purchase was started by an agent. Experian is binding agents to verified consumers and their devices. (The Paypers. US testing only.)
Q3What is it allowed to do?converging
Retailers are splitting: some keep agents out of their checkouts, others let them buy and send catalogs to the agent platforms. (PYMNTS, relaying the WSJ.)
Q4How far does authority travel?open
Google's Gemini agent can now act for a role, like a finance analyst, with its own attested identity. When the person in that role leaves, does the agent's authority leave too? No deployed protocol answers that yet. (Google Cloud. Google's own claims.)
The four questions are laid out in the Know Your Agent library.
03 · One number
$20B → $144B
US ecommerce through AI platforms is forecast at more than $20 billion in 2026 and more than $144 billion by 2029. Today's share is small. The slope is the story. (eMarketer. Dec 2025.)
04 · One move
Find every “are you human?”
List every point where your site or your systems ask “are you human?” before someone buys, cancels, signs or pays. For each one, write down what you actually need to know at that moment: who the agent is, who stands behind it, and what it's asking to do. That list is the start of your surface.
Get The Door.
One email every two weeks: the takes that mattered, which question moved, and what to do at your own door. Three minutes to read.
Each item states its source and how much weight it can bear. Question status is our reading of the field, not a claim made by the sources. Pegasus Source is independent of the companies covered here.