Costco Let The Bots In

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 ChatGPT converted at one third the rate of sending the shopper to its own site, so the winning posture is discover in the assistant, buy on your site. In this episode, Stephen Forte covers: - **The call.** Triple digits twice, highest conversion of all site traffic, the membership among the top items, the three companies named, and the product-page work behind it. - **The industry number.** Adobe's data, as reported: AI-referred retail traffic up 138 percent in a year, converting 54 percent better; half of the average grocery page unreadable to a machine. - **The map.** Amazon's 101 no's and its Perplexity lawsuit, turned back by the Ninth Circuit on 4 August. Why blocking is a luxury of the company that is already the destination. - **Walmart's lesson.** One third the conversion inside the chat; OpenAI's pivot to discovery. - **Five moves.** One: find out whether you are letting them in (answering agents versus training crawlers; Cloudflare's 15 September default; the Google-Extended myth). Two: put the price and the facts in the page the server sends, not in a script, and put the all-in price on it. Three: feed them directly and keep the feed current (OpenAI's nine required fields). Four: ask the three assistants what they say about you, then build the analytics channel. Five: keep the checkout. - **What not to buy.** An llms.txt file: none of the three vendors' crawler documentation mentions it. - **The broken metric.** Your search ranking is a score in a contest the customer is starting to stop watching. The customer did not search. She asked. And the answer had somebody's price in it. **Sources:** - Costco Q4 FY2026 earnings call, 24 September 2026 (transcripts via Webull and Investing.com); Q3 FY2026 call, 28 May 2026; press release: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000909832/000090983226000084/costex9918-k92426.htm - Amazon.com Services v. Perplexity AI, Ninth Circuit opinion, 4 August 2026: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2026/08/04/26-1444.pdf - robots.txt files of amazon.com, costco.com, walmart.com, target.com, homedepot.com, bestbuy.com and others, fetched 27 September 2026 - Search Engine Land, 20 March 2026; Digital Commerce 360, 24 March and 17 June 2026 (Adobe data) - Cloudflare, new AI traffic options, 1 July 2026: https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-ai-options/ - OpenAI crawler documentation and product feed specification; Anthropic crawler documentation (7 April 2026); Google crawler documentation (3 March 2026) and Merchant Center structured data help *The AI Brief from the YPO Technology Network is a daily executive briefing on the AI developments that matter to business leaders. Hosted by Stephen Forte.*