AI shopping agents are coming: ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can already browse shops, compare products and soon buy on a user's behalf. But can they actually get into the stores?

We checked 100 large online shops from Germany, Austria and Switzerland (data from 1 November 2026) and looked at three things:

What does robots.txt say about AI crawlers and agents?

Does the homepage even load for a simple automated client?

Is there an llms.txt file that tells AI assistants what the shop is about?

1. robots.txt: most shops let AI bots in

77 of 100 shops have a robots.txt .

Only 9 of them block at least one of the 17 AI user agents we checked (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others).

The strictest: Westwing blocks 15 of 17 , Zalando and Jako-o 8 each, Notebooksbilliger 7.…