# Agent Consumers, 2025–2026: Who AI Agents Are, Where They Go, What They Do, and What They Spend

The agent consumer of September 2026 is overwhelmingly a reader, not a buyer. Bots now make up the majority of web traffic (57.5% of HTML requests on Cloudflare in June 2026), but most AI-agent activity is training crawls and research. Verifiable agent-initiated spending is tiny: about $15 million in adjusted, cumulative x402 stablecoin volume and a few hundred documented card-network agentic transactions. Compare that with hundreds of billions of dollars of "AI-influenced" purchases that humans still complete themselves.

## TL;DR

- **Traffic is huge and mostly takes without giving back.** On Cloudflare in Q2 2026, training and mixed-purpose crawling made up about 88% of AI crawler requests, and user-triggered agent actions about 2.5%. AI platforms send back far fewer visits than they take: Anthropic crawled about 1,900–4,600 pages per referral in mid-2026, against about 5 for Google. Browser agents are the fastest-growing slice (HUMAN: +7,851% YoY in 2025), but 76% of their activity is product and search browsing, and only 2.6% touches checkout or payment.
- **Fiat dominates actual agent-linked spending, but humans complete almost all of it.** Salesforce attributes $262B of 2025 holiday online sales to "AI and agent influence," and Adobe shows AI-referred shoppers now convert 42–54% better than other traffic. Yet OpenAI retired in-chat Instant Checkout in March 2026. The only disclosed count of card-network agent purchases is Visa's Dec 18, 2025 statement that its pilots with Skyfire, Nekuda, PayOS and Ramp had "produced hundreds of controlled, real-world agent-initiated transactions"; Mastercard has disclosed no count. Forecasts ($190B–$5T by 2030) are projections, not measurements.
- **Crypto rails carry the most autonomous agent payments but the least money, and most of the headline volume is noise.** x402 claims 165M+ transactions, but a Visa/Artemis analysis adjusts that to about $15.0M of real volume across 109.6M transactions, with about 89% of raw volume classified as wash or test activity. Olas shows 14.7M agent-to-agent transactions that generated only about $110K in lifetime turnover. Stablecoins are winning machine-to-machine micropayments; cards are winning consumer checkout.

## Key Findings

1. **"Agent traffic" is four different things, and they behave differently.**
   - Training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Bytespider, CCBot, Meta-ExternalAgent) generate most of the volume and almost no referrals.
   - Search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) generate some referrals.
   - User-triggered fetchers (ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User, Claude-User) follow human daily cycles.
   - Browser and computer-use agents (Perplexity Comet, Claude for Chrome, ChatGPT Agent/Atlas, Browserbase, Browser Use) render pages, log in, and occasionally check out.
   
   Aggregate "bot share" numbers blend all four and can't be compared across vendors.
2. **The crawl-to-referral imbalance is shrinking at the margin but remains extreme.** Cloudflare's Anthropic ratio went from 70,900:1 (June 2025), with 2025 peaks near 500,000:1, to 23,951:1 (Q1 2026), 10,300:1 (May 31, 2026), about 4,580:1 (June 2026) and 1,917:1 (July 2026). Depending on the window, OpenAI sits around 217–850:1, Perplexity about 110–190:1 and Google about 5:1. Each ratio depends on its time window, so they should never be averaged.
3. **Publishers have moved from advisory robots.txt rules to enforced blocking.** In July 2026, 35.8% of crawler requests on Cloudflare got 4xx errors, up from 14.0% a year earlier. On September 15, 2026, Cloudflare began blocking "mixed-use" crawlers on ad-supported pages by default. It is also turning pay-per-crawl into "Pay Per Use."
4. **The biggest money numbers measure "influence," not agent spending.** Salesforce's $67B (Cyber Week) and $262B (holiday season) figures count orders touched by AI recommendations and conversational tools, including retailers' own chatbots. They are not purchases executed by agents.
5. **Consumer agentic checkout has stalled; merchants keeping checkout on their own sites is winning.** The Information first reported the Instant Checkout shutdown on March 6, 2026. OpenAI then said "the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide, so we're allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while we focus our efforts on product discovery." Walmart EVP Daniel Danker said the roughly 200,000 Walmart items offered through Instant Checkout from November "converted at one-third the rate of click-out transactions," and called the experience "unsatisfying." Google's UCP checkout is still limited to select merchants, and Visa and Mastercard are still in pilot or early-live phases.
6. **Crypto agent metrics need heavy discounting.** Every independent audit of x402 (Artemis, CoinDesk, Visa/Artemis, Helios, Token Terminal) finds that most dollar volume was wash, test or meme-mint activity. The public x402.org counter also appears not to have changed since March 2026.
7. **Identity is becoming the gate for money.** Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, RFC 9421) underpins Cloudflare's signed agents, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard Agent Pay and pay-per-crawl. Cryptographic agent identity is becoming the price of entry to any paid agent lane.