By EMARKETER
Publication Date: 2026-03-16 04:00:00
The news: AI startup Perplexity is petitioning a federal appellate court to lift a recent order that bans its Comet shopping agent from accessing Amazon.
- Amazon initially sued Perplexity in November for concealing its AI shopping agents; it won a temporary injunction last week to block Comet AI from scraping Amazon’s website.
- A judge ruled that Amazon provided enough evidence that Comet accessed its site without authorization.
- Amazon also claimed that Perplexity’s AI agent caused issues for its ad business, arguing that AI-generated ad traffic requires impressions to be detected and filtered before advertisers can be charged.
- In its response, Perplexity claimed that Amazon benefited from the situation and didn’t experience harm.
Why it matters: The case highlights growing tensions between big platforms and AI agents that automate online tasks like product research and purchasing, and could shape how AI tools interact with ecommerce platforms.
That shift matters because consumers are already using AI tools for shopping research and product discovery; 64% use AI to compare products, 62% for researching categories, and 53% for discovering new brands, per Bazaarvoice. While a much smaller portion (22%) use AI for adding products to their cart and checking out, that could change if AI shopping agents expand beyond research into completing purchases on users’ behalf.
Should Perplexity be allowed to access Amazon, it could set a precedent for whether AI agents are allowed to…
