Blend Commerce’s AI Shopping Audit 2026, published October 6 with a statement issued November 4, 2026, found that security software at 29 of 200 UK and US retailers, including Home Depot, Best Buy, Macy’s, Tesco, Argos and Next, refused its automated shopping agent on two separate attempts, even though every refusing store whose crawler rules could be read welcomes the search bots of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. The audit scored each retailer out of 100 on whether an AI agent could reach the site, find products, read product data and get a basket to the checkout; the average across all 200 was 65. Baby and nursery retailers led the 20 sectors with an average of 88, while fashion came last with 49. Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Anthropologie and JD Williams scored zero because they refused every request Blend made, including requests for the home page and the robots.txt file. Testing ran between September 8 and 15, 2026, using Blend’s own software rather than ChatGPT or Gemini. Nothing was bought; one item went into a basket and the journey stopped at the checkout page, and on the endpoint test Blend created one basket and one checkout and then cancelled both.