ArcReport/arc-agent-commerce

3,324 online stores checked: can AI shopping agents buy from them?

Snapshot 2026-10-09.r3: 3,324 stores, checked 6 Oct 2026 to 9 Oct 2026. The check finished for 3,307 of them (17 did not respond in time and are marked not_tested). Percentages below are of those 3,307.

	Stores	Share
AI agents can get a checkout link through the store's agent connection	1,309	39.6%
AI agents can search products through an agent connection	1,486	44.9%
No agent connection found: no product search, no valid UCP profile, not blocked (agents must click through the site like a person)	1,362	41.2%
Bot protection blocked ARC's agent check	347	10.5%
Publishes a valid Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) profile	1,597	48.3%
Shopify stores with a checkout link agents can use	1,264 of 1,557	81.2%
Stores not detected as Shopify with a checkout link agents can use	45 of 1,750	2.6%
robots.txt blocks at least one AI crawler (of 2,983 readable robots.txt files)	153	5.1%
robots.txt blocks AI assistants fetching pages for a user (same base)	101	3.4%

All rows come from ARC's automated HTTP check. 82 stores also have a browser cart test (browser_cart_test). A checkout link is not a purchase: ARC never pays or places an order.

A free, open, per-store answer to one question: can an AI shopping agent find products and reach checkout at this store? Published by ARC at arcreport.ai/data under CC-BY-4.0. A new dated snapshot every Monday.

Start with store_answers: one row per store, plain yes/no answers, a one-sentence verdict, the single most useful fix, and a link to the store's page on ARC with the details.

Column dictionary: store_answers

Column	What it means
domain	The store's website, without www.
store_name	Store name from ARC's curated list. Empty for stores added by the public.
category	What the store sells (ARC's label). Empty when ARC has not labelled it.
platform	Shop software detected from the homepage (for example Shopify). "Not detected" means no known fingerprint (often a custom site). Empty means the homepage could not be read.
market	Where the storefront sells (ARC's curated label, not measured). Empty when not labelled.
checked_at	Date (UTC) of the latest automated check.
can_agents_find_products	Could an AI agent search the store's products through a machine-readable agent connection and get a product back (the specific product, for the ~90 Index stores where ARC tests one)? yes / no / blocked (bot protection returned a block page to ARC's check) / not_tested (the check did not finish). "no" is about agent connections only: an agent may still click through the website like a person.
can_agents_read_price_and_stock	Does the product page ARC opened list price and stock in structured data agents can read (schema.org Product)? yes / no / not_tested (no product page could be opened).
can_agents_get_checkout_link	Did the agent connection hand back a checkout link for a product it returned? yes / no / not_tested. ARC stops there: it never pays or places an order, so "yes" means an agent can reach checkout, not that a purchase was completed.
agent_catalog_type	Which agent connection answered with a product search tool: Shopify UCP MCP, Shopify Storefront MCP, or none.
ucp_profile_valid	Does the store publish a valid Universal Commerce Protocol profile at /.well-known/ucp? yes / no / unknown (blocked or errored).
webmcp	Does the homepage declare WebMCP tools for in-browser agents? yes / no / not_tested (checks before 6 Oct 2026).
blocks_ai_crawlers	Does robots.txt disallow at least one of the AI crawlers ARC tracks (answer, search or training bots) from the homepage or tested product? yes / no / unknown (robots.txt could not be read). A rule in a file, not an observed block.
blocks_ai_answer_agents	Same, but only for AI assistants fetching pages for a user (for example ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User). yes / no / unknown.
browser_cart_test	Result of ARC's separate browser cart test, where it exists (about 90 stores): for example "2 of 5 added to cart". Empty means no browser test.
verdict	A plain answer to "can AI agents buy from this store?", the same sentence as the store's ARC page. The strongest answer is "AI agents can reach checkout": ARC's agent got a checkout link. ARC always stops before paying, so it never claims a completed purchase.
top_fix	The most useful change for the store, in plain words, the same as the first fix on its ARC page. Empty when nothing is needed.
checked_by	How the answer was measured: "automated HTTP check" or "automated HTTP check + browser cart test".
evidence_url	The store's page on ARC with the full details.
tested_url	The page the check started from: the homepage for most stores, one product page for Index stores (query string removed).
source	How the store got into ARC: index (weekly browser Index), directory (ARC's curated list), submitted (added by the public) or checked (one-off check).
snapshot_date	Date of this snapshot.
method_version	Version of ARC's method used.

How it is measured

Two separate methods. Every row says which one it comes from (checked_by).

1. Automated HTTP check (every store). A plain program, not an AI model and not a browser, requests the store's machine-readable shopping interfaces the way an agent would: the Universal Commerce Protocol profile at /.well-known/ucp, Shopify's agent catalog endpoints (/api/ucp/mcp, /api/mcp), a product search, and the cart step that returns a checkout link. It also reads the homepage (platform fingerprint, WebMCP tags) and robots.txt. It identifies itself, runs at most about once per host per week, and never pays or places an order.
2. Browser cart test (fewer than 100 Index stores only). Five ARC browser test shoppers each try to put one real product in the cart through the normal website, stopping before payment. Shown in browser_cart_test. These are ARC's own test runs, not sessions of any named consumer AI product.

Limitations (please read before citing)

• A checkout link is not a purchase. ARC stops at the link. "yes" means an agent could reach checkout through the store's agent connection on the check date, not that an order would succeed.
• "no" is about agent connections only. A store without one can still be used by an agent that clicks through the website like a person. Our browser cart test covers that, but only for fewer than 100 stores.
• One check, one moment. Each answer is the store's latest check (dates in checked_at). Stores, bot protection and stock change; a single failed check can be temporary.
• "blocked" means ARC's own request got a block page. Real agents may or may not be treated the same way.
• robots.txt is a rule in a file, not an observed block. Bots may ignore it, and firewalls may block bots that robots.txt allows.
• The store list is a sample, not all of e-commerce. It is ARC's curated directory plus stores the public submitted. It leans toward English-language, direct-to-consumer brands and toward Shopify.
• Labels such as category and market are ARC's curated labels, not measurements.
• not_tested and unknown are used only where there is genuinely no result; they never mean "no".

Other tables

The full technical detail stays available alongside store_answers:

Table	One row per	What it holds
rails_checks	Store	The raw fields of the automated HTTP check (UCP profile status, MCP endpoints, catalog tool, cart status, WebMCP, platform id, evidence label)
stores	Index store	Browser cart test results: score, test shoppers that added to cart, failure label, per-persona outcome
adoption_history	Week × source × metric	Weekly counts
protocol_matrix	Protocol × stage	Declared / Valid / Usable / Transacts counts per protocol
personas	Browser test shopper	The five browser test personas

Field reference for the technical tables: arcreport.ai/data/README.md. Method and changelog: arcreport.ai/methodology.

What is excluded

No scraped page text or product copy, no model-written prose, no costs, no emails, accounts or visitor data. Only ARC's own answers, signals, URLs and dates.

Licence, citation, corrections

CC-BY-4.0. Attribution: ARC, arcreport.ai. Store owners can ask for a correction or removal at arcreport.ai/contact.

Files in this snapshot

Mirror of the official ARC open dataset at arcreport.ai/data, updated after each weekly snapshot (Mondays). Files are byte-for-byte copies of ARC's published CSV and Parquet.

Current snapshot: 2026-10-09.r3 (snapshot date 2026-10-09, generated 2026-10-09 16:03 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10).

Config / table	Rows	What it holds
store_answers	3,324	Start here. One row per store in plain words: can AI agents find products and get a checkout link, what blocks them, a one-sentence verdict, top fix, and whether the answer is from the automated HTTP check or also the browser cart test.
stores	89	Latest completed ARC Index result per store (browser cart test: score, personas that carted, failure label).
rails_checks	3,324	Latest HTTP agent check per store domain (UCP profile, WebMCP, storefront MCP, catalog tool, cart link, checkout WebMCP).
adoption_history	17	Weekly aggregate counts by source and metric (long format).
personas	5	The five ARC browser shopper personas (A to E) with legacy alias ids.
protocol_matrix	24	Declared / Valid / Usable / Transacts counts per protocol with evidence labels.

from datasets import load_dataset
answers = load_dataset("ArcReport/arc-agent-commerce", "store_answers", split="train")  # start here

Or just download latest/store_answers.csv.

Versions

• latest/ is the newest snapshot. To cite exact numbers, cite a version folder under versions/ or the Hub tag v<version> (e.g. v2026-10-09.r3), not latest/.

• Version folders never change once published. A second export on the same date is YYYY-MM-DD.r2, .r3 and so on. versions.json lists every version.

• 2026-10-07 (generated 2026-10-07 08:08 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10)

• 2026-10-07.r2 (generated 2026-10-07 11:27 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10)

• 2026-10-07.r3 (generated 2026-10-07 11:41 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10)

• 2026-10-07.r4 (generated 2026-10-07 14:32 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10)

• 2026-10-07.r5 (generated 2026-10-07 19:17 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10)

• 2026-10-09 (generated 2026-10-09 15:47 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10)

• 2026-10-09.r2 (generated 2026-10-09 15:54 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10)

• 2026-10-09.r3 (generated 2026-10-09 16:03 UTC, method arc-method-2026.10)

Citation

@misc{arc_agent_commerce_index_2026,
  title  = {ARC: can AI shopping agents buy from these stores? Open dataset},
  author = {{ARC}},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Snapshot 2026-10-09.r3, method arc-method-2026.10},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/ArcReport/arc-agent-commerce}},
  url    = {https://www.arcreport.ai/data},
  license = {CC-BY-4.0}
}