Yelp, Delta, and JPMorgan Slam the Door on AI Agents

This is expected. A lot of these companies that are closing their doors make a large portion of their revenue based off of ads and upsells which agents can easily be instructed to ignore, and don't interact with like a human.

Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.

People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.

That's perfectly fine by me. I'll read those arguments and buy those things my agents can find on the open web; which is plenty.

Want to argue for a shining new world, but you're on a locked site? I guess we'll have to live with dystopia. Want to sell the greatest widget since the invention of sliced bread? Well, I never found it. Sorry, I bought inferior widgets from your competitor instead. I'm at a physical sales location, but I can't access your spec-sheets? Your competitor the next shelf over doesn't have that problem, I'll go buy theirs.

I hope the irony isn't lost on these companies. Meta is one of the most aggressive companies against any sort of automation, perhaps after LinkedIn.

I'm trying to build a personal social media client to stop the platforms from shoving their feeds down my throat and to consume only the content I care about, so this hits home.

(I just got blocked from LinkedIn for letting an agent set all of the 77 email notification toggles off, which in hindsight was obvious but I wasn't going to do that manually since every toggle has their own separate page, it's a lot of clicks.)

Companies don't want it to be easy to cross shop their competition, the whole premise of Amazon is that it's so easy and simple you don't even check the competition. AI agents are leveling the playing field and helping customers find the best deals, so of course they're being banned

An easy solution is to sell a "web search" subscription add-on that gets distributed to the sites your agents utilize. The script will flip overnight and ASO (agent search optimization) will be born. It could be a form of micropayment system that the internet has desperately needed for over a decade now.

Websites are closing their doors to their users too. I'm unable to register a GitHub account because the third-party bot protection service they use, called DataDome, thinks I am a bot just based on my IP and probably my extension combination, both in Firefox and Chromium. Datadome is also preventing me from accessing some regional sites of Leroy Merlin, Idealista, and a few other major websites in Portugal and Spain whose IT management suddenly decided Datadome is good for them.

A year ago, I contacted DataDome directly and they assured me that "fighting false-positives is their biggest priority" and their filters were fixed for a while until recently. A few days ago, I contacted them again, and now their stance is different: "our support channel is for customers only and this ticket will be closed." However, their customers have no idea that DataDome messes with their end-users, and reaching a tech support person who actually knows about their website using DataDome is unbelievably difficult.

Datadome reminds me of Cloudflare in their early days, when they were breaking UX for many users with Google reCAPTCHA.

Without a convenience moat, commerce will get even more adversarial: membership pricing, surveillance pricing, loyalty perks, varied products to avoid price comparison (like mattresses and Costco).

Fortunately, if AI is really superhuman in capabilities it may still win the battle for the customer and keep prices competitive: aggressive price comparison, alternatives discovery, negotiation, group buying, etc.