In the browser-extensions post, I looked at how a later affiliate interaction can replace your portal attribution. The follow-up question: what happens when an agent does the clicking?
If you’ve been anywhere near tech news lately, AI agents are having a moment. Meta launched Muse on Sep 8 - a personal agent that’ll shop and check out for you from its app or WhatsApp. Instinct, a startup you text like it’s a person, will book travel, buy stuff and cancel your subscriptions for you (and just raised money at a $10B valuation, which is… a lot). And on Sep 29, OpenAI launched dots - always-on ChatGPT agents that each get their own cloud computer and browser to work from, 24/7.
That “own computer” bit is what matters for us portal folks. Your portal cookie lives in your browser. A dot (or Instinct, or whatever other agent) shops from its own computer - one that’s never clicked through your portal, isn’t logged into your portal account, and sits on a datacenter IP (exactly the kind of thing portal fraud checks get twitchy about). Even Muse, which uses your card, goes straight to the store. No portal click, no portal cookie, no cashback or miles.
a16z had a good piece on this recently: Who Gets Paid When AI Does the Shopping? The gist is that AI assistants don’t need to beat Amazon at warehouses - “They need to become the place where you decide what to buy.” Interesting read on who wins (Shopify, Instacart) and who sweats (Amazon, which already blocked Muse from shopping on its site, and DoorDash). What’s not in there at all: shopping portals. Or your cashback.
So far, the portals’ answer is to drag you back into the old flow. Rakuten’s browser extension now watches for stores mentioned in AI chat answers and pops up its offer, so you click through the normal way.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of AI (it’s how this site gets built). It’s great for the research part. But the buying part is where the money is, so here’s what I do:
1. Let the AI find the product and the price. 2. Check the rate on CBYS. 3. Click through the portal yourself (portal-only browser profile, per the Honey post) and check out like a human.
Have you had an agent-made purchase track through a portal and reach payout? The useful details are which agent and browser it used, where the portal click happened, and whether you had to take over checkout.
Related: Browser extensions and portal tracking covers the portal-only browser profile, and Balling on an AI budget covers how I pay for the agents.