Amazon opens its search to outside stores

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This is Marketing Is Calling, the audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter from PPC Land. It's Friday, November 6th, 2026 This episode is read by an AI voice.

Today, Amazon opens its search results to stores that don't sell on Amazon. Bot protection turns away an AI shopping agent at 29 of 200 retailers. Google's AI mode starts booking plumbers, and millions of AI written Facebook pages turn up in Google.

We start with Amazon. On Wednesday, November 4th, Amazon launched the ShopDirect Merchant Workspace, a free portal where online retailers that don't sell on Amazon can register, upload their product feeds, and appear in US Amazon search results and in Alexa for shopping. Sign up takes three steps. Create an account, verify the website, and share the catalog. Merchants keep control of pricing, stock, and customer service, and Amazon says there are no fees.

Shoppers see a ShopDirect label and can either click through to the store or use Buy For Me, where Amazon's AI completes the purchase on the merchant site.

As PPC Land pointed out, there's an irony here. Amazon has spent the year keeping outside agents off its own store, including suing perplexity and blocking Meta's shopping agent in September. Now, it wants to be the agent that shops everyone else's stores. Amazon hasn't said how these listings rank against paying sellers or whether they can carry ads.

The retailers on the other side aren't ready. The conversion agency Blend Commerce sent an automated shopping agent to 200 retailers in the UK and US in September. 29 of them refused it twice, including Home Depot, Best Buy, Macy's, Tesco, Argos and Next. Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman wouldn't even serve their robots files. Here's the twist. Of the refusing stores whose robots files Blend could read, all 24 said ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude were welcome. So Blend blames bot protection software, not policy. Blend's chief executive, Adam Pearce, said, most of these retailers have likely told the AI companies their agents are welcome. Even where agents got in, only 18% of stores published a product barcode number, and 37 of the 38 stores with a working agent checkout ran on Shopify.

Identity is the other bottleneck. An Okta survey found only about one in five organizations is moving at its target pace on AI and only 22% give their agents tightly limited credentials. Just 6% of consumers won't fully autonomous AI, but more than half would let an agent act if they could prove or reverse its choices.

Google, meanwhile, is turning answers into bookings. Search Engine Roundtable reported that AI mode now lets people research and book home services with Angie, Thumbtack, Housecall Pro and Jobber as launch partners and Service Titan on the way. It's US only for now. Google's Robbie Stein described a plumbing emergency at home where AI mode compared local prices and ratings before he booked a plumber.

For companies that have long sold home services leads, a booking that starts and ends inside Google moves them further down the line. Google is also piloting car dealership inventory on business profiles, and search profiles have started showing LinkedIn alongside YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X.

Now to the most striking index story of the day. Search Engine Roundtable reported that Meta has built more than six million AI written pages under a Facebook answers directory. Each summarizing a topic from public Facebook posts. They rank for millions of queries in Google and turn up in AI overviews, AI mode and Gemini. Glenn Gabe called it scaled content abuse, which Google spam policies prohibit. Barry Schwartz suspects the pages won't stay indexed for long. It's a test of whether Google's rules apply with equal force to one of the biggest sites on the web. Google also has exceptions of its own. Gary Ilias explained that Google can temporarily protect important pages from dropping out of the index, even when they return errors. That's what happened when the VLC media player website served the famous I'm a teapot error code and lost its favicon in results. On the ad side, performance max channel definitions will come to standard search and shopping reports in 2027 An asset activity page has appeared in Google ads in the data, with weekly AI generated suggestions. And Google is testing blue website addresses in search ads instead of black. Over to Brussels. A 571 page study for the European Commission found that the Digital Markets Act hasn't given advertisers and publishers meaningful access to pricing and performance data from Google, Meta and Amazon. Only 58% of advertisers get raw log level data, falling to 18% for attribution. Every publisher interviewed saw no improvement on pricing. One advertiser said the platform started using privacy as a reason not to share data. The study recommends separating the buying and selling sides of ad businesses and creating an EU ad fraud task force. It is in the Commission's official position. In the United States, privacy is being enforced in court. Provoto AI projects that companies will pay more than $1.4 billion this year to settle class actions over tracking on websites and apps, up 36% on 2025 Meta's ad tracker appears in 100 of the 116 settlements it studied, and health care providers make up nearly two-thirds of defendants. In Europe, two UN experts raised concerns about how Ireland appoints members of its data protection commission, which oversees Meta, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and LinkedIn. The commission has issued about 4 billion euros in fines, around two-thirds of all announced GDPR penalties. Retail media has reached the petrol pump. Adweek reported that RaceTrac, the Southeastern gas station and convenience chain, has launched Track Media Group, built on its 6 million loyalty members. And Microsoft Advertising became the first search platform connected directly to MediaOcean's Prisma, so orders, performance data, and invoices flow between the two systems.