Why now

The evidence, dated, sourced, and not overstated.

Forecasts are labelled as forecasts. Every number links to its source and says what it does not mean. Last verified 25 Sep 2026.

Agents are arriving

+54%
Adobe: AI-referred retail traffic converted 54% better than other traffic (May 2026, US retail).

Doesn’t say: AI-referred traffic (people who clicked from an AI answer), not agents completing purchases.

+138%
Adobe: AI-referred traffic to US retail sites, year on year (May 2026).

Doesn’t say: Growth from a small base.

20%
Salesforce forecasts 20% of holiday-2026 e-commerce traffic will originate from AI chat agents (a forecast of traffic, not orders).

Doesn’t say: A forecast of traffic, not orders.

2.6%
Share of agentic activity that reaches checkout or payment. Discovery is about 76%. Most agent failures happen long before “Pay”.

Doesn’t say: Share of observed agent activity across HUMAN’s customers.

13.4%
Travel’s share of agentic traffic, and there is no protocol checkout for most bookings.

Doesn’t say: Share of observed agentic traffic, not bookings.

They often fail

⅓
Walmart: in-ChatGPT checkout converted at about one-third the rate of click-out to walmart.com.

Doesn’t say: One retailer, one assistant, one period. It shows the gap can be large, not its size for you.

96% vs 31%
AI agent task completion on accessible vs inaccessible sites (1,560 runs, 6 models); agents used 43% more tokens on inaccessible sites.

Doesn’t say: Six sites and six unnamed models; a strong signal, not a universal rate.

11% / 19%
Share of small / large merchants rated agent-ready in the PYMNTS × Visa GDSI study.

Doesn’t say: Readiness as assessed in that study’s method.

97%
Share of published llms.txt files that never receive a single request. Agents act on your pages, not your spec files.

Doesn’t say: Measures requests to the file, not its SEO value.

The same barriers carry legal risk

6,000+
Digital-accessibility lawsuits projected in the US for 2026; 79% target e-commerce.

Doesn’t say: Projection for 2026 from midyear filings.

26 Apr 2027
ADA Title II web-rule compliance date for large public entities (small entities: 26 Apr 2028), after DOJ’s one-year extension.

Doesn’t say: Applies to US state and local governments.

Since 28 Jun 2025
The European Accessibility Act applies; enforcement is active in the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Norway.
Source: Deque, 2026

Doesn’t say: Enforcement varies by country.

Deliberately omitted.

“93% of merchants want AI providers to bear the loss” circulates widely but we could only find it in secondary sources, so we do not use it.

See where agents fail on your funnel.

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