Adobe’s 2026 holiday forecast puts US online holiday spending at $275.1 billion for November and December, and expects traffic from AI assistants to US retail sites to grow 130% year over year. That is people asking ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity what to buy and clicking through to a store.
Before a shopper clicks, the assistant usually has to read the store’s page. So we wanted to know a simple thing: when an AI agent shows up at a big retailer’s homepage, what does it get?
How we checked
We ran our free agent-readiness check on the homepages of 20 large US retailers on November 5, 2026, one site at a time, and then ran the failures a second time to rule out a one-off.
The check fetches the homepage the way a simple AI agent would, with a user agent that names us (X1Y1-Tools/1.0). It then looks at robots.txt rules for the AI search and assistant bots, whether the page has readable text without running JavaScript, structured data, metadata, sitemap and llms.txt. It scores out of 100.
Two limits to keep in mind. First, our checker is not ChatGPT. Many bot protection services keep allow lists of verified AI bots, so a store that turned us away may still let OpenAI or Anthropic through. Second, a homepage is not a product page. This is a first look, not an audit.
The results
| Retailer | Result on Nov 5 |
|---|---|
| Target | 88 |
| Nike | 80 |
| Walmart | 68 |
| Costco | 68 |
| Gap | 68 |
| Ulta | 68 |
| Williams-Sonoma | 58 |
| Nordstrom | 35 |
| Amazon | 5 |
| eBay, Etsy, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Macy’s, REI, Sephora | Bot-protection response (HTTP 403), both runs |
| Chewy, Wayfair | Bot-protection response (HTTP 429), both runs |
| Lowe’s | Bot-protection challenge page, both runs |
| Best Buy | Could not connect, both runs |
10 of the 20 sent our checker a bot-protection response instead of the homepage, on both runs. Best Buy did not answer at all.
Amazon is the clearest case
Amazon scored 5 out of 100, and it is not an accident. Its robots.txt, which we fetched again on November 6, has Disallow: / for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User.
The last few matter most. ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User are not training crawlers. They are the bots that fetch a page when a person asks an assistant a question in real time. Amazon is telling all of them no. The raw HTML of its homepage also had no readable text for our checker and no JSON-LD structured data.
Amazon has its own shopping assistant, so this reads as a business choice: keep the shopper inside Amazon. It is still worth knowing when you see a forecast of 130% more AI traffic. The biggest store in the country is opting out of it on purpose.
What the top scorers do right
Target scored 88. Its robots.txt lets the AI search and assistant bots in, the homepage has real text in the HTML without JavaScript, it has structured data and a sitemap, and it is the only one of the 9 sites we could read that serves an llms.txt file.
Nike, Walmart, Costco, Gap and Ulta all let the assistant bots in and serve readable HTML. They lost points mostly on structured data, missing llms.txt, and not offering a plain markdown version of pages. Nordstrom let the bots in, but its homepage HTML had no readable text without JavaScript, which is why it scored 35.
None of the 9 offered markdown versions of pages, and only Target had llms.txt. Those are small, newer signals, and nobody has proven they move sales. We would not rank them above the basics.
Where this is overhyped
A few things we would not claim from this data:
- That eBay or Home Depot “block AI”. We saw a bot-protection response to our checker. Their real policy for verified AI bots may differ.
- That a higher score means more sales. It means an agent can read the page. Price, stock and trust still decide the purchase.
- That 130% growth means AI is a big share of traffic. It is a growth rate, and Adobe does not say how big the base is in that number.
What a smaller store can do with this
This is the part we care about. Half of the biggest stores in the country give an unknown agent a wall, and the biggest one says no on purpose. When a shopper asks an assistant for “a waterproof hiking jacket under $200”, the assistant can only recommend what it could read.
A Shopify or DTC store can be easy to read in an afternoon. What we would check before Black Friday:
- robots.txt. Make sure ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User and OAI-SearchBot are not disallowed. Decide separately about training crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot; that is a different question.
- Bot protection rules. If you use Cloudflare, Akamai or similar, check whether verified AI bots are allowed, or whether everything without a browser fingerprint gets a challenge.
- Product pages without JavaScript. Load a product page with JavaScript off. Name, price, stock and the main description should be in the HTML.
- Product structured data. Product JSON-LD with price, currency and availability, kept in sync with the page.
- One test. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity about your own product by name and see whether they can quote the current price.
You can run the first three on your own store with our agent-readiness check. It is free and takes about ten seconds.
Next week
This is the first post in a weekly series where we run our checkers on one industry’s best-known sites. Travel is next, then healthcare and banking. If there is a site you want in the travel set, tell us.