Websites Are Closing Their Doors to AI Agents: Yelp, Delta, JPMorgan Draw Lines

What happened

Review site Yelp told TechCrunch it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program. Delta Air Lines prevents agents from booking tickets on users' behalf. In finance, JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab both confirmed they are blocking AI agents from accessing customer accounts over security concerns.

Users say sites that previously worked with their AI agent are no longer accessible, including Cars.com and Amtrak, suggesting more companies may be quietly blocking them. In e-commerce, Amazon went to war with Perplexity's agentic shopping feature last year and sued the startup; more recently Amazon said Meta Muse's "continued access" violates its site policies, and xAI's Grok, Instinct's agent and OpenAI's Dots were also reported unable to use Amazon.

If there are companies that are actively working to make that not happen, there are just fewer useful things the agents can do.

— Chris Canal, CEO of AI safety evaluator EquiStamp (to The Verge)

Meta responded earlier this month to blocks targeting Muse: "Turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it," saying it would rather work with businesses on the underlying concerns than see them lose customers. Meta has partnered with retailers including Walmart, Gap, Sephora and Best Buy to let Muse shop on their sites; Shopify has also opened its merchant network to AI agents. The Verge reached out to OpenAI and Google for comment on the roadblocks and did not immediately hear back; Instinct declined to comment.

Even where sites do not ban agents outright, anti-bot systems can still trip them up. Reddit users reported Google blocking accounts that use Muse over "suspicious activity"; Cloudflare, after introducing a one-click block for AI crawlers in 2025, began blocking crawlers that scrape websites for both search indexing and AI training.

Key facts

1. Yelp: Admits only AI agents that pay for its data licensing program (told TechCrunch)
2. Delta: Prevents agents from booking tickets on users' behalf
3. JPMorgan, Charles Schwab: Confirmed blocking AI agents from customer accounts over security concerns
4. Amazon: Sued Perplexity over agentic shopping last year; recently said Muse's "continued access" violates its policies
5. The other side: Meta partnered with Walmart, Gap and others to admit Muse; Shopify opened its merchant network to agents