Almost 100,000 online stores are now ready for AI shopping helpers

Almost 100,000 online store domains run by Commerce.com can now give AI shopping assistants a clear set of tools for searching products and building a cart. Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company, switched it on for all of them at once. Store owners did not have to change their sites. Any merchant who does not want it can turn it off from the Commerce.com dashboard.

What changed

Most AI assistants that shop today read a web page the way a person would. They guess which button does what, click, and try again if they are wrong. That is slow, costly, and can break when a store changes its theme.

A new browser standard called WebMCP, proposed by Google, offers a fix. A store lists tools, such as search_products, and the assistant uses them directly instead of guessing. Cloudflare added WebMCP support in beta in August. It inserts a small script at the edge, meaning on Cloudflare's servers before the page reaches the shopper, so site owners write no code.

How a purchase works

Say a shopper asks an assistant for a waterproof trail running shoe under $140 in size 10. The assistant finds the store's tools and uses them to search and add an item to the cart. It works inside the shopper's own browser session on the store's own domain. It sees the same prices and cart the shopper would.

The shopper clicks checkout personally. Payment details stay on the merchant's site, and no credentials go to a third party.

Merchant control

WebMCP was first built as one on-or-off setting for a whole domain group. Commerce.com hosts many merchant domains on shared setups, so that was not enough. Cloudflare used rules it already had, plus a note stored for each store, to skip WebMCP for any merchant who opts out.

• Commerce.com turns WebMCP on for its main zone.
• A merchant flips the opt-out switch in the dashboard.
• Cloudflare then skips WebMCP for that store, with no injected script and no added delay.

One early snag also came up. The bridge expected each store's tool server at /mcp, but Commerce.com's lives at /api/mcp. Cloudflare added a setting so the path can be changed.

What is still early

WebMCP is still an experimental proposal in early preview. It is available through experimental Chrome flags, Chrome Origin Trials, some agentic browsers and developer tools like Cloudflare Kitesurf. Most shoppers will not see assistants using it yet. The material does not say how many merchants have opted out or how many shoppers have used the tools.