Opening up to AI bots helped produce the biggest gains in AI shopping readiness among North America’s 1,000 largest online retailers last quarter, with Costco climbing 182 spots, GoPro 173 and Scheels 168, according to ReFiBuy’s Q3 AI1000, which it co-developed with Digital Commerce 360. ReFiBuy’s checks also found retailers that one AI agent could reach while another was blocked, across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. ReFiBuy CEO Scot Wingo said Amazon and eBay block bots on purpose, but a larger group of retailers may be doing it through IT settings their commerce teams don’t know about, which he said will cost them holiday discovery traffic.
