On its 24 September earnings call Costco's CFO said traffic from AI search grew triple digits for a second consecutive quarter, converts better than any other source, and sells the membership itself. He named Gemini, Anthropic and OpenAI as the sources, and said teams are cleaning up product data and pages so that Costco's value shows up correctly in the large language models. In May the CEO explained why: regular search never showed the all-in price; the models do.

Then the map. Amazon's robots file names 101 automated visitors and turns away every AI agent, including the ones that answer a live question. Costco, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, IKEA, Carrefour, Etsy and McMaster-Carr have no AI rule at all; Best Buy lets the answering agents in and shuts out the training crawlers. And the honest counterweight: Walmart's checkout inside ChatG ...