Are AI agents already buying from your store? Most agent orders now come through your normal checkout

AI agents are probably already buying from your store, and most of those orders won’t be labelled as agent orders. Forter, a fraud-prevention company, published order data from its merchant network this month. In the last week of September, 65% of the AI-agent orders it saw came from agents that open their own browser and fill in the store’s normal checkout pages, the same way a person would. The rest came through the commerce protocols that ChatGPT and Google use. On Shopify, protocol orders show up in your admin with channel or referrer attribution. Browser-agent orders look like any other web order. Here’s what Forter’s numbers do and don’t tell you, and where you can look to spot agent orders on your own store.

What Forter’s data says

Forter’s post, AI Agent Order Data (published 1 October, updated 8 October), separates two kinds of agent orders. OpenAI and Google “check out through commerce protocols, identified by where the shopper came from.” Muse, Instinct, Grok Bot and ChatGPT Agent “use screen scraping, driving the merchant’s own checkout pages, identified by the agent platform.”

The balance between the two changed quickly. In Forter’s words, browser agents “made up 1% of agentic orders at the beginning of August and 65% last week.” The jump came from Meta’s Muse, which Forter started detecting on 21 September. Forter’s explanation is that browser agents “can shop anywhere, while the protocols can only reach those stores that have integrated them.” It found that Muse “bought at 74% of the stores that received” an agent order, and ChatGPT Agent bought at 45%, “nearly double OpenAI’s commerce protocol.”

What it doesn’t tell you

The coverage turned this into “agents are moving from browsing to buying”. That’s fair as a direction, but three limits matter before you act on it:

• There are no order counts. The headline growth figure is that agent orders “are now 5.3x their early August level.” Forter doesn’t publish the starting number, so 5.3 times could still be a very small share of all orders. The post doesn’t give a share of total orders anywhere.
• It only covers Forter’s network. These are stores that use Forter’s fraud tools, not the whole market. If you sell on a small Shopify or WooCommerce store, your mix of agents could look very different.
• Detection lags. Forter says its detection dates “may be later than the dates they actually started placing orders.” So some of the early-August “1%” may be agents Forter couldn’t yet see.

What the data does support is the part that matters for you: the agents placing the most orders right now don’t need you to integrate anything. They use the checkout you already have.

Orders that arrive labelled

If you’re on Shopify, protocol orders are the easy part. Shopify’s Help Center says: “Orders from AI channels display in your Shopify admin with channel or referrer attribution so that you know where the order originated from.” ChatGPT works as a referrer, not a checkout. In Shopify’s words, ChatGPT users “complete their purchase on your online store checkout in a ChatGPT in-app browser, or in a new tab.” Google, Copilot and Meta can use Shopify-powered direct checkout, which I mapped in the AI channels post.

That includes Muse. On a Shopify store with direct checkout turned on, a Muse order is a channel order (I covered the defaults in the Muse post). Forter counts Muse as a browser agent. My reading, which is inference and not something Forter states, is that both are true: Muse uses Shopify’s rail where one exists and its browser everywhere else.

Orders that don’t

A browser agent doesn’t come with a label. Meta describes Muse as running on “a dedicated secure computer with its own browser” that “can open a browser, fill out forms”. When it pays, “Muse can checkout with Link built by Stripe”, and “Link’s wallet for agents generates a one-time-use card so your real card details stay hidden.” So the order you receive has the shopper’s name and address and a card the shopper won’t use again. Nothing in that order says an agent placed it.

OpenAI’s browser agent is the exception, because you can identify it before the order is placed. OpenAI’s help page, now titled “ChatGPT Work’s Cloud browser allowlisting”, says it “uses Web Bot Auth to sign outbound HTTP requests, allowing website operators to verify that requests genuinely originate from ChatGPT.” Every request carries a Signature-Agent header set to "https://chatgpt.com", and the public keys are published at chatgpt.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. Akamai lists the traffic as “ChatGPT Agent” and Cloudflare as bot tag chatgpt-agent, detection ID 129220581.

I fetched that key directory on 9 October. It held one Ed25519 key, set to expire on 16 October 2026. If you verify signatures yourself, fetch the keys each time instead of saving a copy, because they rotate.

For Muse I found nothing similar. Meta’s crawler documentation lists a Meta-ExternalFetcher that supports “helping AI navigate websites to complete tasks for users” and says it “may bypass robots.txt rules”. Meta doesn’t say that Muse’s checkout visits use it, and I found no Meta page that explains how a store can recognise Muse.

What to check this week

1. On Shopify, look at your orders by channel. Your AI-channel and ChatGPT-referred orders are the part of agent buying you can measure directly. Treat that as your floor, not the total.
2. If you use Cloudflare or Akamai, check what happens to signed ChatGPT traffic. OpenAI’s page gives the exact allow rule for both. Whether you allow it is your decision, but make it on purpose and don’t leave it to a default bot setting.
3. Be careful with “looks automated” fraud rules. A browser agent’s order is placed for a real shopper, with that shopper’s address and a payment method the agent carries. If your rules decline orders because they look scripted, some of those declines may be real customers using an agent. I can’t measure how often this happens from outside, and Forter’s post doesn’t say either.
4. Read the growth multiples as direction, not size. “5.3x” with no starting number tells you agents are growing. It doesn’t tell you how much of your revenue they are.

The useful change in Forter’s data is not the growth rate. It’s that the fastest-growing agents don’t wait for you to integrate a protocol. They shop through the checkout you already run, so it’s worth knowing which of those orders you can actually see.