Meta's Muse, which launched in September, is an AI agent that researches, compares and buys on a person's behalf. More than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set it up, but the companies they might buy from see very little. DoorDash counts the orders from Muse and other agents in the hundreds, and Hilton calls its agent bookings insignificant.
The low count is real. It is also the least useful thing to learn from this, because it says nothing about what agents already do to the pages they visit.
An agent is the first customer with no insider knowledge
Your regular customers know things your website never says. They know the discount code goes in a box that only appears at the last step, that the kitchen stops taking orders at nine even though the button still works, and which pop-up to ignore. An agent arrives knowing only what the page says, so it stalls wherever the page leans on habit.
For example, a bakery that sells pickup cakes online has a 10% code for returning customers and closes at six. The site lets anyone choose a seven o'clock pickup and only complains at payment. A person who hits that error shrugs and phones, or gives up, and the owner never hears about it. A shopper who tells an agent to order the usual cake for Saturday with their discount gets a stalled agent or the wrong cake. Either way, the owner finds out about a rule that was already costing sales.
So the agent did not create the problem. It is the first visitor whose failure can be traced, because you can ask it afterwards where it got stuck. Half an hour spent this way on your own site, with a code, after closing time and with an address a little outside your delivery area, usually turns up the rules nobody wrote down.
Some of the zero is a blind spot
Companies report what they can count. When an agent buys through a platform's built-in checkout, the shop's own page may never load, so the web analytics tools never see the visit and the order shows up only in the order system. An agent that drives a browser the way a person does can look like any other customer.
A shop that reads its sales from web analytics could therefore see agent orders shrink to nothing while its order list grows. The order list is the number to trust.
The fee comes after the habit
Meta plans to take a cut from the stores on purchases that go through Muse. For now it charges no fee for Muse checkout beyond normal payment costs, so the early orders are cheap ones.
Hotels learned what happens next. Online travel agencies brought in guests that a hotel could never have reached alone, and over time commissions rose from around 10% to commonly 15% to 30% a booking. Hotels could not see which guests the agencies had won them, so they could not tell what those guests cost.
A shop that can already tell which orders came from agents can judge what a fee is worth while the numbers are small. That is a second reason to fix the checkout and the order records now.