You keep an origin healthy while staying open to AI agents by caching the cheap, near-static surfaces agents read most and reserving your compute for the offer data that has to be fresh, not by blocking the agents that would have selected you.
Key takeaways
A live, user-triggered agent fetch hits your origin at question time while a shopper waits, so the cost of being open is real, but the answer is caching, not blocking.
Retail is one of the sectors AI crawlers hit hardest, and crawl-to-refer ratios can be extremely lopsided, so plan for the fetch load instead of being surprised by the bill.
Edge-cache the near-static machine surfaces (llms.txt, Markdown mirrors, feeds, mostly-static product pages) and keep price and availability on a short leash so an agent never quotes a stale offer.
