AI assistants designed to book travel, manage accounts or buy products are encountering blocks across major websites. Users of agents from Meta, xAI, OpenAI and Instinct report that services which work for people in a browser are refusing automated access, limiting what these products can do outside their own platforms.
The reasons vary. Yelp allows only agents covered by its data-licensing program. Delta Air Lines blocks agents from booking tickets, while JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab cite security concerns when denying account access. Users have also reported failures on Cars.com and Amtrak. Amazon previously sued Perplexity and sought to stop its shopping agent from making purchases on the site.
The dispute is partly technical and partly economic. An agent handling credentials or payments creates fraud and accountability risks. At the same time, automated shopping can bypass advertising, recommendation systems and customer interfaces that generate revenue. Perplexity has argued that an agent acts as the user’s chosen assistant, while Amazon says third parties should identify themselves and respect a service’s decision not to participate.
There is no shared standard that resolves those competing claims. Until sites can authenticate agents, define delegated permissions and assign liability, broad promises of assistants that act everywhere on the web will remain constrained by each service’s rules.