Amazon launches 'Buy for Me' shopping agent in main search bar after retailer complaints

Amazon embedded an AI shopping agent in its main search bar this week. The feature, called Buy for Me, does something Amazon has spent years telling others they cannot do: scrape its catalog to power a commercial AI agent.

The contradiction is not subtle. Amazon blocks third-party AI agents from browsing its site and purchasing on a user's behalf. Walmart does the opposite, welcoming the same kind of automated shopping tools Amazon is now deploying at scale inside its own search bar. The asymmetry has drawn scrutiny from retailers and legal experts who say it amounts to a rule-for-thee-but-not-for-me moment in the nascent era of AI shopping agents.

Buy for Me launched publicly on May 13, six weeks after retailers first reported finding their products listed inside the feature without their knowledge or consent, as CNBC reported. Amazon confirmed it had been testing the underlying capability since February 2025 under the names Shop Direct and Buy for Me, as SiliconANGLE first reported. The company told Modern Retail at the time that testing was limited to a small group of US users. By January 2026, retailers were finding their inventory inside the feature without having agreed to participate.

Amazon says Buy for Me is opt-in for retailers. The retailers who complained publicly to CNBC in January said that is not how it looked from their end. Amazon removed the Buy for Me button from some product pages after the backlash. The feature is now live for all US customers on the Amazon Shopping app and website, no Prime membership or Echo device required, according to Amazon's corporate blog.

The broader context is Amazon's bet that AI shopping agents will reshape how consumers discover and purchase products. More than half of consumers — 54% — used Amazon to research products in 2025, surpassing search engines like Google at 51%, according to Gartner research cited by Retail Dive. Rufus, the predecessor to Alexa for Shopping, helped over 300 million customers in 2025, according to Amazon. Amazon is betting that number grows as the agent becomes more capable and more embedded in the purchase flow.

The accountability question is who controls that flow. Amazon's terms of service prohibit automated scraping of its catalog. Third parties who build shopping agents that attempt to browse Amazon or execute purchases through its site have been blocked, sent cease-and-desist letters, or had their access revoked. Amazon has not applied those same restrictions to itself. Digital Commerce 360 reported the contrast: unlike Walmart and other retailers, Amazon has "generally preferred to discourage third-party AI agents from browsing its site and catalog."

Walmart has taken a different approach. Its Marketplace API and AI partner program explicitly invite third-party agents to operate inside its ecosystem. Digital Commerce 360 flagged this as a potential competitive differentiator. Where Amazon treats third-party AI agents as a threat to its monopoly on the purchase path, Walmart appears to be treating them as a feature.

The retailer complaints in January 2026 were the first signal that Amazon was not merely running an experiment. The feature had real products from real merchants, displayed with prices and purchase links, inside a button labeled Buy for Me. The merchants had not agreed to appear there. Amazon described the situation as a test. The test ran for roughly a year before becoming a product.

Whether this constitutes a legal problem for Amazon depends on questions no court has fully answered: what counts as scraping when an AI agent reads a product page, what obligations attach when a platform displays third-party inventory, and whether a company can simultaneously enforce strict anti-scraping rules against competitors while building an equivalent capability for itself. None of those questions have clean answers yet. The FTC has not commented publicly on the feature.

The stakes are real for small retailers. A merchant whose products appear inside Buy for Me faces a different competitive situation than one whose products appear in a standard search result. The agent completes the purchase without the customer ever visiting the retailer's site. There is no brand impression, no cross-sell, no relationship built. For a small brand that relies on Amazon traffic to sustain its own direct-to-consumer business, being listed inside Buy for Me could mean losing customers to a frictionless purchase they never chose to offer.

The rebrand from Rufus to Alexa for Shopping is also an infrastructure story. Rufus launched as a chatbot that lived inside product pages, answering questions about individual items. Alexa for Shopping is positioned as a general shopping assistant that operates from the search bar, can browse across retailers, and completes transactions on the user's behalf. The capability jump is significant. So is the placement. Amazon moved its AI shopping agent from the bottom of a product page to the center of its main search interface, where most purchase decisions begin, according to TechCrunch's reporting on the launch.

Amazon declined to comment for this story.

Amazon has 300 million reasons to get this right. So do the retailers who did not ask to be part of it.