Agentic orders quadruple on Forter's network as holiday…

Muse and Instinct push agent traffic past merchant readiness, and 70% of agents still default to scraping any site they can reach.

Agentic orders have more than quadrupled on Forter’s network since August, the fraud-prevention firm reported alongside the October 13 launch of its Agentic Commerce Engine in New York. The network covers more than 2 billion shoppers, nearly 1 million businesses, and roughly half a trillion dollars in annual retail transactions, so the volume curve isn’t a rounding error.

The jolt has a name, actually several. Agentic order volume rose 24% month-on-month from August to September, 48% once Instinct and Grok Bot were counted, and 229% the week Muse orders first appeared on September 21. By the final week of September, Muse alone accounted for 46% of agentic orders, with purchases clustering between $50 and $200. ChatGPT Agent now originates nearly a quarter of its orders outside the US.

Merchants haven’t kept up. Fewer than 11% of small merchants are ready for agentic traffic, per Forkast’s read of Forter data, and automated fraud attempts doubled in the past 60 days. Agents that can’t find a clean integration path, Forter notes, “default to scraping websites,” a route roughly 10x slower and 5x more token-heavy than headless protocol integration. Michael Reitblat, Forter’s CEO, puts it plainly: merchants are “effectively opted in by default, whether they’ve prepared for agentic traffic or not.”

The infrastructure response is landing in the same window. Skyfire and Forter announced a Know Your Agent tokens partnership on October 22; a Jomashop pilot pushed agentic checkout success to nearly 100%. On October 21, TechCrunch reported Walmart president and CEO John Furner unveiling the Agent Gateway MCP server and Agent Profiles at Masters of Scale, while Amazon continues to block agents outright.

The signal for small merchants compresses the usual 6–12 month planning horizon into 6–8 weeks. American Express flagged to small merchants last week that agents are now a customer channel; the holiday-discovery gap documented across small businesses on October 19 sits inside the same problem, as does Google’s universal cart now scores merchant eligibility in real time. Forter’s own survey of 2,000 UK adults found 53% have used or are open to AI gift-finding, and 39% of those open to agentic shopping say they’re more likely to buy from retailers that visibly support agents.

For an owner-operator without a marketing hire, services such as LemonLime (https://lemonlime.com) that continuously audit a storefront’s competitors and content for missed sales and content opportunities are one way to surface agent-readiness gaps before Cyber Monday, the customer still approves what ships.

Agentic orders quadruple on Forter's network as holiday peak closes in

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