AI-powered shopping agents are flooding retail websites, with traffic surging an absurd 4,700% in the last year, according to Visa. And while 85% of shoppers who’ve tried using AI say it actually improved their experience, there’s a huge, clumsy problem: the internet’s security guards can’t tell a helpful AI shopper from a malicious bot.
Merchants are stuck. Their own bot detection systems – often run by companies like Cloudflare – are designed to spot and block automated traffic. This means legitimate AI agents, trying to “search, compare and pay” on a consumer’s behalf, are getting kicked out right alongside scrapers and denial-of-service attacks.
On Tuesday, Visa, in a major collaboration with Cloudflare, unveiled a potential solution: the Trusted Agent Protocol.
This isn’t a new app or service, but a foundational framework – a set of rules – designed to create a trusted, secure communication channel between AI agents and merchant websites. Think of it as a digital passport for AI agents. It aims to solve three core problems for merchants:
- Mistaken Identity: It helps bot detectors distinguish trusted, commerce-focused AI agents from malicious automation, so they stop blocking potential customers.
- Lost Customers: It allows merchants to recognize the human behind the agent, supporting both guest checkouts and, more importantly, logged-in experiences for existing customers.
- Data Blindness: It preserves the merchant’s visibility into who is making the purchase and what payment method is being used, which is critical for analytics and fraud prevention.
How It Works: The Agent’s Digital Passport
The protocol works by having “approved agents” use agent-specific cryptographic signatures to securely pass three key pieces of information to the merchant’s system:
- Agent Intent: This is a signal that says, “Hi, I’m a trusted agent with an intent to buy, not a scraper bot.”
- Consumer Recognition: This carries data indicating whether the consumer already has an account or has shopped with the merchant before, allowing the agent to act on behalf of a known user.
- Payment Information: The agent can securely carry payment data to work with whatever checkout or payment method the merchant prefers.
“We believe the entire payments ecosystem has a responsibility to ensure sellers can trust AI agents as much as they trust their best customers and networks,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer. He noted that the new protocol is “focused on creating no-code functionality” for merchants to securely identify agents.
This partnership is particularly notable because Cloudflare, whose technology powers a significant portion of the web’s bot-blocking infrastructure, is a core developer. “Securing the future of commerce is a shared responsibility, especially as AI agents begin to act on behalf of consumers,” said Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare’s Chief Strategy Officer. “Our work with Visa… is a vital step in building the necessary guardrails for this new ecosystem.”
This Isn’t Just a Visa Project
While Visa and Cloudflare led the development, they’ve been gathering feedback from a laundry list of the biggest names in payments and e-commerce. The list of “early partners” includes Adyen, Ant International, Checkout.com, Coinbase, CyberSource, Elavon, Fiserv, Microsoft, Nuvei, Shopify, Stripe, and Worldpay. Having this entire group’s input suggests a serious, ecosystem-wide effort to solve the AI commerce problem.
This isn’t just some proprietary Visa black box, either. The company states the protocol is built on the foundational HTTP Message Signature standard (an open IETF standard) and is “aligned with Web Both Auth” (likely a typo for WebAuthn or a related web authentication standard).
Crucially, Visa says it’s committed to making this an open, interoperable system and is already working with global standards bodies like the IETF, OpenID Foundation, and EMVCo. The company also explicitly stated it’s working to ensure the Trusted Agent Protocol complements other new frameworks, like the “Agentic Commerce Protocol,” and is collaborating with Coinbase to align on interoperability with x402, another protocol for machine-to-machine payments.
This is the technical plumbing being laid for a future where AI agents can actually navigate the web and spend money on your behalf. The Trusted Agent Protocol is available for developers to inspect starting today in the Visa Developer Center and on GitHub.
