How to sell on Instinct
Instinct, the AI shopping assistant, opened to invites in August and by late September had raised a billion dollars at a ten billion valuation. People use it to book restaurants, order the food shop, cancel subscriptions, chase refunds and buy things.
It works nothing like Muse, and the difference is the whole point of this page.
Muse got there by partnership. Shopify put merchant catalogs inside it, so a big slice of the market was included automatically and didn't have to lift a finger. Instinct made no such deal. It shops the way a person shops: it opens your website and uses it. Goes all the way to the Pay button, then hands back to the human to confirm.
There's no merchant programme. Your website is what Instinct uses, exactly as it stands today.
Agentic commerce is a checkout problem first
Most writing about agentic commerce is about payments. For a shop selling to people, agentic commerce shows up first as a checkout problem: whether the Instinct assistant can get through the site you already have. Payments come much later.
Which means your checkout is an API now
Bit dramatic, but it's the practical upshot. Anything a customer can do on your site, a robot will try to do on your site. Every rough edge you've been living with for two years is now an edge a machine hits, and machines don't email you about it.
It has to find the product, compare it, decide you're trustworthy, and get through checkout. Nearly half the shops we scan fall over at step one, because their product data isn't in a form anything can read. Half hide shipping cost until checkout, which is usually the number that decides the comparison. 69% have reviews a machine can't see.
But checkout's where most attempts actually die.
The sale you'll never know you lost
A person hitting a confusing checkout mutters and works it out. Surprise cookie banner, region picker, an address box that rejects flat numbers without saying why, a "prove you're human" check. Annoying, all of it, and people get through it every day.
A robot doesn't work it out. It stops.
And you won't find out. There's no angry session recording, no abandoned cart email, nothing in your dashboard moves. Most analytics setups can't even tell a robot was there, because the visit doesn't look like a human one. That's before you get to the 46% of shops we scan whose analytics were already broken.
So the sale fails silently, and the first you'd hear about it is never.
The free test
Buy something from your own shop, but refuse to be clever.
Fill in only what's required. Don't guess at a confusing label. Don't go back and re-read an error you already got past. The second something's genuinely unclear, stop.
Wherever you stopped is roughly where the robot stops. People are usually surprised how early that is, and it's usually cheap to fix once you've seen it happen.
Two more
Check what your bot protection does. Plenty of shops block anything that isn't a normal browser, which used to be exactly right. Some of that traffic is now customers. Amazon has deliberately blocked Muse from their site and that's a perfectly sensible call for Amazon. The bad version is blocking assistants by accident because nobody told your security vendor the rules changed.
And write the boring facts down. Shipping, delivery time, returns, sizes, materials, as text. Highest-value thing on this page and it's mostly copywriting, not engineering.
On Shopify?
Most of what's above is checkable by hand, and you should do the checkout test yourself regardless. For the readability half we built a free Shopify app, Mimetic Conversion & AEO Agent, which scans your live store, tells you which products a robot can't properly read, and fixes the safe ones in your theme with a rollback if you don't like it.
On the AI payment stuff
Instinct stops at the Pay button and lets a human confirm. More of that will get automated, and there's a standard called MPP being built for it.
Worth knowing what it's for, though. MPP covers a robot buying something for itself, like data or compute to finish a task. If your customer is a person and the robot's running their errand, it isn't your problem, and setting it up won't win you a single order. If you sell something a machine would consume directly, that's different, and how to integrate with Instinct goes into it.
Either way the order holds. No payment standard helps a robot buy a product it couldn't read, from a shop it couldn't get through.
Where these numbers come from
Every percentage on this page comes from our own scanner, run against the last 220 ecommerce sites we audited before 2026-09-28. It's an automated pass over live pages: what loads, what's in the markup, what a crawler can and can't reach. Not a survey, not an estimate, and not a sample we picked to make a point. Where a check didn't apply to a site, that site isn't counted in its denominator, which is why the totals differ per row.
We'll re-run it as these assistants change. If a number here is stale by the time you read it, tell us and we'll fix it.
Want to know where a robot gives up on your shop? Easier to work out together than alone. Book 30 minutes and we'll walk your site the way an automated buyer does, show you where it loses the thread, and tell you which fixes matter. If you're on Shopify, the free app will have half the answers before we talk.