A federal appeals court just answered a question that has been quietly reshaping retail: when an AI shopping assistant clicks through a merchant’s pages, who is the visitor? For now, the Ninth Circuit says it is the person at the keyboard.
What the court decided
On August 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction that had blocked Perplexity AI’s Comet browser assistant from Amazon shopping accounts. Amazon filed the case in November 2025 under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, after first flagging Comet’s user-agent behavior in August 2025.
The panel never reached most statutory elements. It stopped at “access.” Amazon pointed to Facebook v. Power Ventures, but the court said that earlier case assumed access without discussion. Perplexity’s technical defense carried more weight: Comet takes screenshots on the user’s machine, sends them to Perplexity’s servers for navigation instructions, and the packets that reach Amazon come from the user’s own browser. Because the CFAA carries criminal liability, the panel applied the rule of lenity and refused to treat that architecture as hacking.
The result is narrow but commercially meaningful. Amazon can still use terms of service, rate limiting and technical blocks. What it cannot do is turn an agent developer’s ordinary product behavior into a federal computer crime claim.
Why marketers should care
The decision does not give agents a free pass. The panel explicitly left open tort claims, other CFAA provisions and future cases with a different factual record. But it shifts the center of gravity from litigation to negotiation.
- Private controls still matter. The ruling says Amazon can regulate access through its own terms for users.
- API partnerships are the real fix. Amazon added a formal agent policy to its Business Solutions Agreement effective March 4, 2026, and joined the Universal Commerce Protocol governance council in April 2026.
- No US federal AI statute covers this. Existing state laws and executive orders do not define who is accessing a site when an agent loads a page.
Google is already pricing the next stage
Five days before the ruling, Amazon reported advertising services revenue of $19.8 billion for Q2 2026, up 26% year over year. That revenue backdrop helps explain why both retailers and platforms want controlled pipes rather than open scraping.
In the same week, Google began testing a pay-per-use licensing scheme for publishers whose content contributes to AI-generated answers. The pilot runs through Search Console and covers Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode. Payments are usage-based and opt-out is allowed, but the calculation method is undisclosed. One participant called the available information “quite black box,” and publishers describe early payouts as small relative to advertising revenue.
This is the same private, unaudited rate-setting logic as the Perplexity ruling: the platform sets the terms, and the counterparty has little visibility into the math.
What to do now
Audit how your site treats agent traffic. Decide whether you want to block, rate-limit or create an API or partnership path for high-intent shopping agents. Watch Chrome’s Private Verification Tokens test, which tries to tell sites whether an Incognito visitor is probably human without exposing identity. And if you operate in the EU, track the fight over automated privacy signals, because consent and visibility rules will shape the same agent-commerce funnel.
The short-term move is not legal panic. It is a plan: terms, technical controls, commercial API access, and a measurement system for agent-driven traffic before it scales.
Source: PPC Land
