Agentic orders are up more than 4x since August. Every merchant is already opted in.
Forter says AI-agent purchases across its network rose more than fourfold since August, and automated fraud doubled in two months. Here is what the release says, and the question it leaves open.
On Oct 13, Forter, a company that sells fraud, trust and payments tools to merchants, announced a product for what it calls agentic commerce. The release opens with a number: agentic orders across Forter’s network have increased more than fourfold since August.
What Forter reported
The release says two things about the last few months. Agentic orders are up more than fourfold since August. Automated fraud has doubled in the last two months. It says consumers are quickly adopting AI personal assistants such as Muse, Instinct and Grok Bot to search, compare and buy on their behalf.
Two caveats come with that. Forter is a vendor with a product to sell on this topic. And the release gives growth rates, not the number of orders, so we do not know how big the base was in August.
Why every store is in
Forter’s chief technology and product officer, Eran Vanounou, is quoted in the release.
Every merchant is now effectively opted in to agentic commerce, whether or not they’ve prepared for it. The choice merchants have isn’t whether agentic traffic engages with their site this holiday season; it’s whether they are equipped to control, optimize and drive revenue from it.
The release explains why. Unlike the invite-only agentic pilots launched earlier this year, the new assistants can default to scraping a merchant’s site when there is no checkout flow built for agents.
Scraping versus a built-for-agents checkout
Forter says screen scraping is significantly slower, more costly and error-prone, and that it hurts the customer experience. In a controlled experiment, Forter says, headless protocols were roughly 10 times faster and 5 times more token-efficient than scraping, and more likely to succeed overall.
This is Forter’s own experiment, and Forter sells the headless route. The release does not publish the method. Take it as a vendor claim that points in a believable direction, not as a benchmark.
The fraud half of the story
The release says bad actors try to blend in with agent traffic, either with malicious agents or by taking over legitimate ones. That makes telling a trusted agent from a fraudulent one important, Forter says. Its new tools identify scraper- and agent-driven traffic in real time, let merchants set conditions for agent checkouts, and show which agents are transacting on a site, so merchants can avoid “blanket-blocking” traffic that could be new revenue.
That last point links to a wider question. Plenty of sites now block agents, on purpose or by accident. Forter’s answer is to sort the agents rather than block them all.
The question the release leaves open
Forter’s tools work at the moment an agent arrives and when it checks out. They do not say what the agent believed about your store before it got there. That depends on what it read, and AI answers can be wrong about prices, shipping and policies.
So two things matter for a brand. Whether the agent can get in and check out cleanly is a question for your payments and fraud team. Whether what it read about you is accurate is a question for your content, product data and policies. Forter’s release covers the first. This post is about the second.
What to do this week
You do not need to buy anything to start. These steps cost an afternoon.
How Shopthru.ai helps
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