This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.
Shopify is drawing a line in the sand on agentic AI — a type of bot that autonomously completes tasks on its own, without human inputs — with new language across merchant websites that appears aimed at blocking agentic AI systems.
Shopify now includes a warning in the code that powers merchant storefronts, telling bots what they can and can’t do. The message appears in each site’s robots.txt file — a standard tool websites use to give instructions to automated crawlers like search engines. The new line states: “Automated scraping, ‘buy-for-me’ agents, or any end-to-end flow that completes payment without a final review step is not permitted.” The change was spotted over the last few days and appears across Shopify storefronts, including Alo Yoga, Allbirds and Brooklinen. The change is visible by appending /robots.txt to any merchant’s URL.
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