TL;DR
ChatGPT Instant Checkout, Amazon Rufus, Perplexity Comet, Google AI Mode, and Copilot compared on what they actually buy — and what none of them can.
→ See how this applies to your business (free 30-min call)If you want an AI agent that actually completes a purchase, the short list is: ChatGPT with Instant Checkout (best for one-off product buys), Amazon Rufus (best inside Amazon's catalog), Perplexity Comet (best for multi-site price comparison), Google's AI Mode with agentic checkout (best for price-drop tracking), and Microsoft Copilot (best for coupon/cashback stacking). Claude for Chrome is the most capable general browser agent but is not a shopping tool. None of them can buy a service — a roof, a root canal, a real estate closing — because those aren't SKUs. If you're a service business reading this to figure out whether AI shopping agents will send you customers, skip to the section on what these agents *can't* do. The honest answer is probably not yet, and the reason matters more than the hype.
The six agents worth knowing, ranked by what they actually do
ChatGPT (Instant Checkout). OpenAI shipped Instant Checkout on September 29, 2025, built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol it open-sourced with Stripe. It launched with Etsy sellers, then extended to Shopify merchants — roughly a million storefronts. You describe what you want, ChatGPT surfaces products, and you pay without leaving the chat. Merchants pay OpenAI a per-transaction fee (reported around 2% of order value) on top of normal card processing of about 2.9% + $0.30. With ChatGPT at roughly 800 million weekly users as of late 2025, this is the largest agentic checkout surface that exists.
Amazon Rufus. Launched in beta February 2024, Rufus is a shopping assistant that only knows Amazon's catalog. That's a limitation and a feature: product data is structured, reviews are real, and "Buy For Me" (April 2025) will even complete purchases on third-party sites for items Amazon doesn't carry. Best-in-class for "which of these 40 cordless drills is actually good."
Perplexity Comet. An agentic browser, not a chatbot. Released July 2025 to $200/month Max subscribers and made free in October 2025. Comet's advantage is cross-site: it will open six tabs, compare prices, and report back. Its "Buy with Pro" flow handles checkout on partner merchants.
Google AI Mode. Agentic checkout inside Search, plus price tracking that watches a product and buys when it hits your target. Google also published the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) in September 2025 with 60+ partners including Mastercard, PayPal, and American Express. Google's edge is Shopping Graph scale — billions of listings refreshed constantly.
Microsoft Copilot. Copilot Merchant Program opened October 2025. Strongest at surfacing coupons and cashback automatically at checkout.
Claude for Chrome. Previewed August 2025 for Max subscribers ($100 and $200/month tiers). Genuinely good at navigating arbitrary web forms, which makes it useful for weird purchases — permit fees, obscure B2B suppliers — but there's no commerce integration, no merchant program, no protected checkout.
What the data says about AI-referred shoppers
Adobe Analytics has been tracking this since 2024, and its numbers are the most concrete public dataset:
That last bullet is the one nobody puts in the headline. The growth rate is real *and* the absolute volume is small. Both things are true, and confusing them is how agencies sell six-month retainers for problems that don't exist yet.
Growth rate and volume are different questions. A channel can triple every quarter for two years and still be less valuable than the phone number in your Google Business Profile.
The part that costs us money to tell you
Thinxster sells AI marketing services to US service businesses. Here's what we'd rather not say out loud.
If you're a local service business, AI shopping agents are almost certainly irrelevant to you right now. ChatGPT's Instant Checkout, Rufus, Comet's buy flow, Google's agentic checkout — every one of them is built around a product catalog with a fixed price, a SKU, and a shipping address. A $14,000 HVAC replacement has none of those. There is no agentic checkout for a job that requires a site visit to quote. If someone pitches you "agentic commerce optimization" for a plumbing company in 2026, they are selling you a feed spec for a feed that has nowhere to go.
The failure modes are specific and worth naming:
Who should not buy AI-agent optimization services: any business under roughly $500K in annual revenue that hasn't yet fixed response time on existing leads. The measured drop-off is brutal — leads contacted within 5 minutes convert at multiples of those contacted after 30. Spending $2,500/month chasing a channel that's under 1% of your traffic while ignoring a 4-hour callback lag is a bad trade, and we'll say so on a discovery call. Our ROI calculator will produce an unflattering number if you plug in honest inputs. That's the point.
Where it does pay off: ecommerce and hybrid businesses with real SKUs — parts distributors, equipment dealers, med-spas selling packaged treatments, anyone with 200+ products and a structured feed. For those, feed hygiene and schema markup are cheap and compound. And for pure service businesses, the adjacent work — being the answer an AI gives when someone asks "who's the best electrician in Tulsa" — is a different discipline than agentic checkout, and it does matter. We wrote about that on the blog.
What to actually do this quarter
If you sell products:
If you sell services:
Pricing for the work we do is public on our pricing page, including the engagements we tell people not to buy.
The honest bottom line
The best AI shopping agent for a consumer today is ChatGPT with Instant Checkout for buying, Rufus for researching within Amazon, and Comet for comparing across the open web. The best AI shopping agent for a US service business is none of them — the technology isn't built for what you sell, and the first vendor who tells you otherwise is guessing. Growth of 1,200% in seven months means this changes fast, so the right posture is: stay crawlable, keep your prices accurate, and don't pay a retainer for a channel that hasn't arrived at your industry yet.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can AI agents actually complete a purchase for me?
Yes, a few can. ChatGPT with Instant Checkout, Google's AI Mode with agentic checkout, and Amazon Rufus can carry a transaction through to payment within their supported merchant networks. Most other assistants stop at recommendations and hand you a link, leaving you to finish checkout yourself on the retailer's site.
Which AI shopping agent is best for comparing prices across stores?
Perplexity Comet is the strongest multi-site comparison tool because it browses independently across retailers rather than staying inside one catalog. Amazon Rufus is limited to Amazon's inventory, and Microsoft Copilot leans toward coupon and cashback stacking rather than pure cross-retailer price comparison.
Can AI shopping agents book services like a roofer or a dentist?
No. Every current shopping agent is built around SKUs — products with fixed prices, inventory, and checkout pages. Services like roofing, dental work, or real estate closings require quotes, scheduling, and human negotiation, none of which these agents handle. Service businesses are not yet receiving meaningful traffic from them.
Is Claude for Chrome a shopping agent?
Not specifically. Claude for Chrome is a general-purpose browser agent that can navigate and act on sites, making it the most capable of the browser agents overall. But it lacks the merchant integrations, payment rails, and price-tracking features that purpose-built shopping agents like Instant Checkout or Rufus offer.
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