Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, moved to tighten control of its platform ahead of the Black Friday peak season by successively blocking external artificial intelligence (AI)-based shopping services, including ChatGPT.
On the 28th (local time), according to U.S. IT outlet The Information, Amazon in mid-month took steps to block access to its website by the "ChatGPT-User" agent and the web crawling bot "OAI-SearchBot," both operated by OpenAI. Amazon had also restricted access by Google agents and bots from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic last summer.
Earlier this month, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, which unveiled a feature that searches for and purchases products on behalf of users through an AI agent, saying it violated Amazon's terms. It also removed some external search firms, including the AI-based shopping search Start - Up Dupe, from its affiliate marketing program. Going forward, even if Amazon products are sold through their apps and websites, these companies will find it difficult to earn commission revenue. Dupe said, "We built our service using software provided directly by Amazon, but we received notice of the affiliate termination just two weeks before Black Friday."
Industry watchers say Amazon's move is driven by a desire to protect its massive shopping ad sales. Amazon prioritizes "sponsored" products that pay advertising fees in user search results and generates about $58 billion a year in sales from this ad business alone (about 85 trillion won). If AI agents, rather than actual consumers, search and buy on their behalf, ad exposure effectiveness declines, which could reduce advertiser demand and sales.
In its complaint against Perplexity, Amazon said, "To honor contracts with advertisers who pay only for actual consumer clicks, we had to develop separate tools to identify and exclude traffic generated by AI agents." Some also see it as a strategy to sideline external AI and build up its own AI features, such as the "Buy with Prime" function and the shopping AI search "Rufus." Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.