Websites are closing their doors to AI agents (The Verge)

Something quiet is happening across the web this month. Websites are closing their doors to AI agents.

The Verge reports that JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab now block agents from customer accounts, citing security. Yelp will only admit agents that pay for its data licensing program. Delta is stopping agents from booking tickets. Users report new blocks at Cars.com and Amtrak. Last month I wrote here about Amazon cutting off Meta's Muse agent and Google auto-enrolling Shopify merchants into agent checkout. The pattern has now spread from retail into banking, travel and local services.

The logic is easy to follow. A business that spent twenty years building a direct customer relationship does not want an intermediary sitting between it and the buyer, answering the questions it used to answer, keeping the data it used to keep, and taking a cut of the margin. Blocking is cheap, and it buys time.

But there is a catch. The agents arriving at the door carry paying customers. Meta's response to the blocks on Muse was blunt: turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it. And the blocking is not always deliberate. Some agents are simply tripping anti-bot systems built for scrapers and fraud, which means the web could get more annoying for humans too, with more prove-you-are-not-a-robot screens in more places.

Two readings are possible. This could be a negotiating posture: Yelp's agents-that-pay line is a price list, not a principle, and the right fee opens the door. Or it could be the early shape of a genuine split, where the consumer web separates into agent-open and agent-closed halves, and whoever controls distribution decides who wins. The honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and the security concerns the banks raise are real.

Worth a look at your own position either way. If an agent carrying one of your customers arrived tomorrow, would you let it in? And if a competitor's agent showed up first, would you still?

#AgenticCommerce #AgenticAI #AusBiz

Source: The Verge, 17 October 2026: https://lnkd.in/g2mGpSan