Meta’s Muse shopping assistant is operating with an instruction set that quietly favors large, familiar merchants. Profound says it extracted the file on September 25, and PPC Land reported the details on October 11. One line in it calls ranking well-known merchants first in the top five picks “imperative.”
The rules behind the shelf
Muse keeps the open web on a tight leash. The instructions extracted by Profound include these guardrails:
- Search at most three stores on the open web and return no more than ten products.
- Discard listings priced far outside a category’s normal range.
- Offer in-chat checkout only for items already in Meta’s catalog that are flagged for agentic checkout.
- When a shopper names a brand, put that brand’s own store first, and favor direct sellers over resellers.
Catalog volume, web-search weight
In Profound’s 50-prompt test, a typical query pulled about 60 products from 30 merchants in Meta’s catalog. Meanwhile, the agent’s browser visited three sites and found four products at two merchants. The final six picks usually split four from the browser and two from the catalog.
That split is the story: the catalog supplied roughly 95% of product candidates but won only about a third of the slots. “Much more weight is placed on candidates returned by the web search,” said Jennifer Zou, an economist at Profound. Meta has not commented, the file may have changed since late September, and it is not clear how “well-known” is defined or how the three stores are chosen.
From shelf to ad account
Muse launched in the US on September 8 and now runs in the US and Canada on iOS, Android, the web and WhatsApp. Third-party estimates put installs above 5 million in the first 22 days; Amazon has already blocked the agent from shopping on its site.
Three weeks after launch, on September 29, Meta extended Muse to small businesses in the US and Canada with 15 connectors, including Shopify, Stripe, QuickBooks, Klaviyo and Meta ad accounts. Meta says nothing publishes, sends or spends without the owner’s approval. What it has not said is whether ad-account access is read-only, or whether the agent could change budgets, bids, targeting and creative after approval is given.
For a small operator like Tom Mulholland, who runs Mulholland Grocery in Malvern, Iowa, the time saving is real: at least 15 minutes on payroll, with Muse, as he put it, taking over a few of his tasks. But the same company is now running an agent that chooses merchants and an agent that can sit inside the advertiser’s account.
What to check now
The practical takeaway for D2C and retail brands is to treat the agent like a new marketplace. Win branded queries with your own store, keep prices inside the category’s normal range, and protect direct-seller arrangements. Before connecting any agent to Meta Ads or Shopify, ask for a written scope and keep human approval on spend.
Meta’s second-quarter revenue was $60.80bn, and $59.36bn came from advertising. That arithmetic makes the line between the shopping agent and the ad-account agent worth watching closely.
Source: PPC Land
