Forter, the retail fraud prevention platform, recorded a 229% month-on-month rise in agentic transactions in the four weeks following Meta's launch of its Muse AI agent, a jump the company says is forcing merchants to accelerate checkout infrastructure changes ahead of the Christmas peak.
The company's data, drawn from its network of retailers, shows agentic orders were already climbing through August and September 2026 — up 24% month-on-month before Muse launched. Since Forter first detected Muse traffic on 21 September, that rate tripled. Most of the AI-driven transactions are landing in the £40 to £160 range and are clustering in travel, tickets and digital services rather than impulse-buy categories, a profile consistent with higher-consideration purchases where checkout complexity is greater.
Forter CEO Michael Reitblat said: "Agentic traffic has more than tripled in a month across Forter's network since Muse and Instinct launched in the US. What makes Muse different from other agentic pilots is that these agents will default to crawling a merchant's website if it's not optimised for agentic traffic. Crawling the site takes significantly longer, is more costly and very error prone. Merchants are effectively opted in by default, whether they've prepared for agentic traffic or not."
Reitblat framed the coming months as unusually compressed. "Usually, merchants may have six to 12 months to react to changing consumer behaviour. Right now, the timeline is closer to six to eight weeks," he said.
The practical challenges are twofold: ensuring the infrastructure can handle automated checkout reliably, and verifying that incoming agents are legitimate rather than fraudulent bots or scrapers. Forter's existing fraud-detection platform is being positioned to address both sides of that problem, but the broader point is that any retailer without a decision on agentic traffic handling will face that choice cold as the Christmas season ramps.
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