Key Takeaways
- Amazon has blocked AI shopping agents like Meta’s Muse from buying on its site, while Walmart has partnered with them.
- Protecting an ad business that brought in $68.6 billion in 2025 is the right call for Amazon today.
- Amazon’s ad revenue grew 26% in the second quarter of 2026, against 15% for its online store sales.
- Walmart trades at 39.5x forward earnings, well above its five-year average of 29.3x, so its AI bets need to pay off.
Amazon (AMZN) has made its choice on AI shopping agents: keep them out.
The company has blocked Muse, the AI agent from Meta Platforms (META), from making purchases on its site, and it bars other companies from using automated tools to shop there. Walmart (WMT) went the other way and signed on as a Muse partner.
Assaf Elovic is co-founder and CEO of Aura, which studies how AI agents use the web. On last week’s episode of the MTS podcast, he said Amazon is blocking assistants like Muse “for very tactical short-term reasons,” and pointed to its ads business.
That business brought in $68.6 billion in 2025, nearly a tenth of Amazon’s revenue.
Which explains a lot.
The ads are growing faster than the store
Amazon’s ads need a human looking at the page. An agent that searches and checks out on its own never scrolls past the sponsored listings.
And that ad money is growing faster than the store it’s sold in. In the second quarter of 2026, Amazon’s ad revenue rose 26% to $19.8 billion, while its online store sales grew 15%.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s operating margin has more than doubled, from 5.3% in 2021 to 11.2% in 2025.
Amazon is earning more on every dollar of sales than it has in years, and its ads are outgrowing its store sales. This would be a strange time to let a bot skip past them.
Plus: Muse belongs to Meta, which runs a huge ad business of its own. As Yahoo Finance’s Hamza Shaban points out, the most obvious reason to block an agent is to keep another tech platform from becoming a powerful middleman. Amazon has no reason to let Meta stand between it and its shoppers.
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Walmart is buying a head start
Walmart is making the opposite bet. In a note published Monday, Bank of America analysts led by Christopher Nardone said Walmart is well positioned if more people hand their shopping to AI. They pointed to its ties to several AI ecosystems, its own shopping assistant, Sparky, and partnerships with agents including Muse.
Walmart is hungry for growth. Its US same-store sales grew 2.6% last quarter, the slowest since late 2020. On Tuesday it also launched a $120-a-year bundle of Walmart+ and Sam’s Club Plus to win members back.
Elovic says agent traffic is growing 8,000% a year. But it’s growing from a small base, and Yahoo notes that most people use AI tools to research products, with few letting them buy. Walmart’s revenue has climbed from $573 billion in the year ended January 2022 to $713 billion in the year ended January 2026…
…so agent checkouts won’t show up in a number that size any time soon.
Walmart is also taking on the risk Amazon is avoiding. Nardone noted it’s unclear what happens to advertising if screenless computers do the checking out, and ads matter more and more to Walmart too.
The market has already paid for the bet
Investors are pricing Walmart like a growth stock. Its forward P/E is 39.5x, well above its five-year average of 29.3x and not far below its February peak of 46.8x.
That leaves little room for its AI bet to disappoint.
Amazon can afford to wait
My take: Amazon is making the right call. An ad business this big, which grew 26% last quarter, is worth far more today than a lead in a channel most shoppers still use to browse. Blocking Muse costs Amazon little in sales for now, and if agents start doing real buying, it can open the door then.
Timing is the risk. Walmart is getting in while shopping habits around agents are still forming. If those habits set before Amazon opens up, the AI race Amazon loses will be for shoppers’ routines, and those are much harder to win back.
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Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
