AI Shopping Agents Are Flooding Retail. Most Security Systems Still Cannot Tell Which Ones to Trust
Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report puts a number behind a problem retailers have been watching build for months. Nearly half of all AI bot traffic observed across Akamai’s global network between July and December 2025 was directed at the commerce sector.
The more revealing figure, however, is what happened after that traffic arrived. Commerce organizations placed more than 90% of AI bot activity into a monitoring category, yet allowed three-quarters of the remaining activity to pass through without restriction.
That gap is quickly becoming one of the defining security challenges of agentic commerce. Retailers know automated traffic is pouring into their websites and applications, but many still lack a reliable way to determine what that traffic is trying to accomplish.
Some of it comes from legitimate shopping assistants comparing prices, checking inventory or completing purchases for customers. Some from conventional crawlers gathering information. And others hail from fraud...
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