About

About Ottom

Ottom is synthetic monitoring for agentic commerce. Real AI agents visit an online store and try to do what a shopper’s assistant would: find a product, check it fits what was asked for, compare it, and get to checkout. Ottom reports the exact step where they stall, and why.

Why it exists

AI assistants have started shopping on people’s behalf. When one cannot read a price or get past a size picker, it does not complain or email the store. It goes to the next shop, and the store’s analytics record a visit that looked fine. Ottom exists to make that failure visible, with evidence a developer can act on. Why it matters makes the full case.

How our agents behave

Being checkable is the product, so our agents are easy to check. They announce themselves with a published user agent and visit from fixed, published addresses. They never pay for anything, use a checkout identity that is plainly a test, and are capped at a fixed number of visits per store per day, counted across every customer. Any store can opt out.

• How our agents identify themselves: the user agent, the addresses and the opt out.
• How it works: what a scan does, step by step.
• How we measure: the scoring method behind the public benchmarks.

Who runs it

Ottom was founded by James Ensor. James’s background is in data, technology and e-commerce: the systems behind online stores, and the numbers that show whether they are working.

Ottom comes from where that experience meets the growing space of AI and agentic commerce. AI assistants are starting to find, compare and buy things for people, and a store now has to work for the software acting on a shopper’s behalf as well as for the shopper.

The company

Ottom is a trading name of 5wire Networks Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales.

Our terms, privacy policy and the other documents we contract on are on the legal page.