Who’s Blocking the ChatGPT Agent? Swiss Top 50 E-Commerce Sites Tested · AEO

Who’s Blocking the ChatGPT Agent? Swiss Top 50 E-Commerce Sites Tested

This is an interesting discussion about which of the biggest Swiss Ecommerce sites are blocking ChatGPT User-agent!

You can check the source and here's the translation:

"Which Swiss Top 50 Online Shops Block the ChatGPT Agent?

⏩ Spoiler: It looks better than expected!

With the ChatGPT agent, online shopping could now be possible. But are the top 50 Swiss online shops also usable or even accessible for the agent? To check this, I commissioned the agent to do so based on the Carpathia AG Top 50 B2C Shops in Switzerland.

Here are the findings, which I have manually re-checked in individual cases.

The vast majority of shops can be visited by the agent. The "party" in the club can therefore begin. I find that very positive. The following "blocks/bouncers" were observed by the agent and myself:

❌ JUMBO

A captcha in the form of a sliding puzzle appears here for the explicit purpose of bot defense.

❌ Orell Füssli Thalia AG and DeinDeal AG

The bot is shown the Cloudflare Turnstile for bot defense. It is not known whether this is intentional or "just" because it was recently introduced by Cloudflare for all AI visits. I had seen this same display a few days ago on Apfelkiste.ch. Apparently, they have already reacted there.

❌ Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund (migros.ch)

Even after several attempts, including with deep links, a maintenance page is always displayed, and the agent cannot access the shop.

❌ La Redoute

A technical error is received here, which, however, points to bot defense.

❌ Amazon (de/fr/it) and AliExpress

A technical error is also displayed here—apparently, the large platforms only want to grant access to their own agents.

🟰 At Nestlé Nespresso SA, there were initial problems, but in further manual tests, the agent was then able to access the site. Apparently, a redirect was not properly interpreted there. Pearl in Switzerland is now called emall.com and can be reached by the agent.

🔝 Overall, I was positively surprised by how open the Swiss online shops were to "agentic-traffic" from ChatGPT. I am curious to see if it stays that way.

I found it interesting that Toppreise.ch, which is otherwise very allergic to bots, let the agent onto their site without any problems. Apparently, they also want to maintain/gain a certain relevance here. Google Shopping is also still accessible to the ChatGPT agent. In my opinion, this could change at some point.

☑️ But just accessing the shop is not the end of the story. I can only advise every shop that wants to participate here to also have an agent add an item to the shopping cart (and buy it). I have already seen agents fail at this (not the one from OpenAI)—interpreting and operating the PDP and the "Add to Cart" button is another level. And those who want to go even further must, from a long-term perspective, definitely deal with MCP or A2A to make their shop accessible to agents even without a frontend.

#AgenticWeb #ChatGPTAgent #Ecommerce #Switzerland

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