How to hide from Amazon’s AI “buy for me” scraping on your website
Over the the 2025 holidays, many sellers were dismayed to see their products listed on Amazon as a “buy for me” option on Amazon! Lawyers are working on it I’m sure – but in the mean time, there is some simple code you can put in your theme file that will prevent this (and a WP plugin for those of you running WordPress/Woo Commerce websites.)
It appears that Amazon is using an AI to scrape websites, and putting product listings on their own site in a “buy for me” pilot – the customer finds your goods on Amazon even though you aren’t an Amazon seller and then orders your product – most times the order does not go through and the customer is mad about it. Many sellers found out about this when angry customers started contacting them!
Robots.txt file is located in your website’s root directory and should be editable. This will stop most of the scraping initially.
(yourdomain.com/robots.txt).
Copy and paste the following into your robots.txt fiile
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Shopify says that it’s publicly available data being scraped, but sellers are reporting that private, not published products appear on Amazon, suggesting that it’s not a scrape at all.
You can prevent what appears to be a Google bot that’s scraping with that code, but if Shopify gave Amazon API access, you have no control over that. However, you DO have control over this and you can put it on your website now:
On your Terms of Service and Privacy page, list this: Explicitly state that scraping is prohibited and requires written consent. Automated scraping, “buy-for-me” agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment outside of our website is not permitted.
We’ll see if Shopify backpedals on this or Amazon stops doing it. I will suggest that this will happen again, and again, as Amazon is interested in having “everything now” available on their site (see the song “Everything Now” by Arcade Fire). For now, protect your (non-Shopify) site from AI scraping by using the code. If you need help with that code, contact me! Shopify now admits they are partnering with Amazon and there is no way to opt out of this, so some Shopify users may wish to look at other platforms. You can read more about alternatives here and here.
Google announces new standard for commerce via AI agents:
On the heels of this, Google has announced it’s own Universal Commerce Protocol that will allow agenic AI to shop for us, with commerce protocols that standardize commerce to allow these agents to shop and purchase for us. What does this mean for Woo Commerce users? Right now, Woo doesn’t natively support UCP, but it’s being asked for by the WP developer community (and I expect this won’t take long.)
Beyond just shopping, there has to be a common payment authorization “this agent has the power to shop on my behalf” – and that will already exist likely with any payment processor your WooCommerce website uses. The UCP works with the Google Agent Payment Protocol to manage this.
What does all this mean for e-commerce retailers? AI will help people shop by letting them ask the agent “I’m looking for this to do this and this” – and the agent can find, and even purchase that item with authorization. What does it mean for those of us with customized products? Humans will still need to be in the process for a while, but expect that as we move into this, it will be more of an automated process with some approval by the human. This is less problematic than the Amazon issue because agents will still check out on your site, you’re not losing the commerce process to Amazon, even if it is the agent doing the purchasing.
What is your next step? Understand what UCP is now: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/agentic-commerce-ai-tools-protocol-retailers-platforms/ and monitor your platform for compatibility to these systems.
This affects all of us who rely on Google search results to deliver our websites / products to consumers whether we want it to or not.
The future of frictionless shopping is becoming ever more frictionless. That can be both good and bad (and over consumerism is a problem for the planet, not just our wallets.) But it’s here, and we will need to adapt.
