Forter’s CEO says merchants have 6 to 8 weeks to react. Black Friday is 31 days away.
Forter says traffic from personal AI shopping assistants more than tripled in a month, and Muse made up 46% of agentic orders by the end of September. Here is what the numbers say, and what they do not.
On Oct 26, eCommerceNews reported new data from Forter, a company that sells fraud and payments tools to merchants. Forter says traffic from personal AI shopping assistants has more than tripled across its network in a month, after tools such as Muse and Instinct arrived.
Forter’s chief executive, Michael Reitblat, put the timing this way: merchants usually have 6 to 12 months to react to changing consumer behavior. Right now, he says, the timeline is closer to 6 to 8 weeks.
Today is Oct 27. Black Friday is Nov 27, 2026. That is 31 days, or about four and a half weeks, so it falls inside the window Reitblat describes.
What Forter measured
Forter says its network links more than 2 billion shoppers with nearly 1 million businesses and covers half a trillion dollars in annual retail transactions. The figures below come from that network, as reported by eCommerceNews. They describe Forter’s customers, not all of online retail.
- From August to September, agentic orders rose 24% month on month, or 48% when Instinct and Grok Bot are included. Forter first saw orders from those two at the start of September.
- Forter first detected Muse orders on Sept 21. That week, agentic orders rose 229% month on month.
- The early spike eased later, but Muse still made up 46% of agentic orders in the final week of September.
- Purchases priced between $50 and $200 are the most common across all agents.
The report gives growth rates and shares. It does not give the number of orders, so we cannot say how large agentic shopping is as a share of all orders.
Why a store that did nothing is still in
Forter says these assistants can store logins, two-factor details and card information, then carry out parts of the purchase through services such as WhatsApp or iMessage. If a retailer has not adapted its site for agentic traffic, some assistants crawl the site instead.
In Reitblat’s words, crawling takes significantly longer, costs more and is “very error prone.” He adds that merchants are “effectively opted in by default, whether they’ve prepared for agentic traffic or not.” Two weeks earlier, Forter’s technical chief said much the same in a press release.
Who is ordering what
Forter says the agents are finding different niches. OpenAI leads in shipped retail categories such as apparel, beauty, sporting goods and consumer electronics. ChatGPT accounts for the largest share of orders above $500. Instinct and Grok Bot made the most expensive purchases overall.
Geography matters too. Forter says pilots tied to Google and OpenAI are limited to the US, and Muse is available only in the US and Canada. Among the services it tracks, ChatGPT Agent has the broadest spread, with nearly a quarter of its orders coming from outside the US.
Shoppers are open to it
The article also cites Forter consumer research. In a survey of 2,000 UK adults on Christmas shopping, 53% said they have used or are open to using AI to find presents. And 22% said they believe AI would choose a better gift for them than their partner.
Comfort falls as the task moves closer to paying. Still, 39% of the respondents who are open to using AI said they were more likely to shop with retailers that have AI purchasing agents. Forter surveyed UK adults, so treat this as a signal rather than a US forecast.
How to read a vendor’s numbers
Forter sells products for exactly this problem, including tools to verify agent shoppers. That does not make the data wrong. It does mean Forter has a reason to say the clock is short. The window, “6 to 8 weeks,” is the chief executive’s estimate, not a measured figure.
What holds up on its own is simpler. The holiday season is a month away. Assistants that buy are now live. And a store does not choose whether an assistant visits. It chooses what the assistant finds.
What to do in 31 days
Forter’s own advice is infrastructure and trust. The part any brand can start today is what an assistant reads. Tick these off as you go.
How Shopthru.ai helps
Shopthru.ai is an AI agents team for consumer brands. It asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI, Perplexity and Copilot what your shoppers ask, finds where AI gets your products, prices or policies wrong, and drafts each fix into an approval inbox. It ships only on your yes, then checks again. Instagram and Amazon are next.