Questions · Buy
Can a cookie banner stop an AI agent from buying?
Yes, if the banner blocks the page and offers no way past it except accepting. Our agent rejects cookie banners, or closes them, and never accepts on anyone else's behalf, so a banner with a labelled reject or close control is fine and is not reported. A banner whose only answer is Accept, or whose controls cannot be reached from the keyboard, is where the journey stops, and it is reported as this stall.
Why it happens
Agents dismiss overlays by finding a control with a recognisable name, such as Close or Dismiss, and activating it. An overlay whose close control is an unlabelled icon, whose dismiss action is a click on the backdrop, or which reappears immediately, presents no such control.
Newsletter and discount modals that fire on a timer are the common case, and they are usually set to appear a few seconds after load, which is exactly when an agent is reading the page.
This comes up at the Buy stage. The full treatment, including how to reproduce it and what to change, is on A popup blocks the path to the cart.
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