A reporter sent Meta’s Muse to shop. It picked a store that does not ship to her.
The Verge’s Mia Sato spent time with Muse, Meta’s shopping agent. Some stores let it in, some did not, and the answers it gave were only as good as the facts it could read.
“Agentic shopping is the inverse: it’s like looking at the world through a pinhole.”
On Oct 22, The Verge published a hands-on test of Meta’s Muse shopping agent by features writer Mia Sato. It is one reporter’s experience, not a study. But it shows what an agent does when it meets real stores, and that is useful to any brand.
The test
Sato gave Muse several ordinary jobs. She asked it to look for a specific face moisturizer, to find the best price on granola bars, and to recommend mattresses under a set price. She compares the experience to sending “an anxious and apologetic teenager out to the store.” It needs many instructions, runs into technical problems regularly, and brings back results that are not quite what you asked for.
Target let it in one day and not the next
Muse was caught in Target’s bot check one day and got through the next. When Sato asked about mattresses, Muse was blocked by Target again, even though it had pulled from the site a few minutes before.
Target spokesperson Loni Monroe told The Verge that success may depend on how an agent went about the task and what safeguards are in place. Agents may reach one part of the site and not another, she said, to protect customer data. Target also has safeguards against unauthorized agents and bots that try to reach customer accounts or start transactions for a person. Target has AI shopping partnerships with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft.
The granola bars
Asked for the best price on granola bars, Muse suggested a listing from a grocery chain that does not ship to Sato’s address. She had to clarify that a West Coast retailer would not ship to New York. Muse also offered options from Sam’s Club, Walmart and Costco, and said Amazon might have had the lowest price but was hard-blocked, so it could not check.
Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay confirmed that Amazon “requested that Meta remove Amazon” from Muse. Sato’s verdict on that errand: between waiting, asking for more sites and fixing the shipping mistake, it would likely have been faster to search herself.
Looking through a pinhole
Sato writes that agentic shopping is the inverse of browsing the open web: it is like looking at the world through a pinhole. If she did not like the five options Muse curated, she had to ask for five more. She had to give it specific parameters and rules and tweak them little by little.
If you have preferences about literally anything you spend money on, the price, the return policy, the shipping rates, the ethical standards of a company, the fabric composition, an agent is just another entity to express those preferences to.
Read that list as a brand. Price, return policy, shipping rates and fabric are all facts a store publishes. If the agent cannot read them, it cannot weigh them. If it reads the wrong ones, it will confidently pick the wrong store for the shopper.
The RealReal and the 20-minute hold
Sato also tried a task she might want to automate. On The RealReal, putting an item in the cart reserves it for 20 minutes. She told Muse to add the 10 newest listings from a favorite brand to her cart and to re-add them each time the hold ran out. She had no plan to buy and ended the task after a day.
The RealReal’s chief technology officer, Luke Friang, said the company stays open to third-party agents that browse, log in and interact, while guarding against activity that could disrupt other shoppers. The Verge updated the story on Oct 25 to say The RealReal then changed its bot defenses to stop this behavior from Muse, while still letting agents direct shoppers to items on the app.
Meta’s spokesperson Tracy Clayton told The Verge that users can take over at any time and that Muse is designed to always ask permission before buying.
What a brand can take from this
An agent that shows five products works from facts it can read on your pages. Where you ship is one of those facts. So are your prices, your return window and your delivery times. A store that states them clearly gives the agent a reason to include it. A store that leaves them vague, or blocks the agent at the door, may not make the five.
You cannot control which agents try your site. You can check what they find. Tick these off this week.
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.