DataDome webinar: AI agent adoption mainstream, discovery funnel fragmenting, bot management becomes intent-based
Source: https://datadome.co/agent-trust-management/future-of-search-agentic-commerce-webinar-takeaways/
News
DataDome published key takeaways from a webinar on agentic commerce featuring executives from Retail Economics, Botify, AWS, and DataDome’s threat research team. The webinar highlights that 73% of consumers in the US, UK, and France have already used AI assistants for product discovery, with nearly 40% using AI for shopping tasks. Key findings include: AI bot traffic increased 5.4x in 2025, with AI discovery generating one visit per 198 crawls versus one per six for Google; 80% of AI agents do not properly identify themselves, while 80% of websites fail to verify agent identity; and the discovery funnel is collapsing from 10+ steps to one or two within AI chatbot interfaces, requiring retailers to shift focus from channel ownership to data accessibility and quality.
Why it matters
This news operationalizes a pattern evident from DataDome’s prior April 2026 agentic commerce analysis (0.72 importance) by crystallizing the infrastructure and security challenges at scale. The 5.4x growth in AI bot traffic and the 198:1 crawl-to-visit ratio directly threaten the reliability of e-commerce analytics and website infrastructure; retailers cannot confidently measure performance or allocate resources while AI agents distort traditional engagement metrics. The identity-verification gap—where 80% of agents spoof or omit identification and most sites either lack bot protection or fear blocking legitimate AI—creates immediate fraud and data exfiltration risk that conventional bot management was not designed to address. DataDome’s advocacy for intent-based agent trust management rather than binary block/allow policies signals a market shift toward granular traffic policies, which could reshape how publishers and platforms implement access controls. The urgency messaging—“now is the time to act”—positions agentic commerce as an active operational challenge, not a future scenario, compelling immediate investment in structured data, on-site AI experiences, and traffic policies by major retailers.