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There’s a new kind of AI in town, and it’s all about you. Which is to say you, personally—these are the new personal AI assistants that go by names like Muse, Dots, and Grok Bot, and they’re ready to dismantle much of the friction in your life. Need to research a trip, book a restaurant, or choose between healthcare plans? With the right context, they can handle it all for you, complete with a smile on their mascot-like avatars.
But just how does one of these assistants recommend what to buy? To find out, I asked my Muse, who I named Jones, which robot vacuum to buy. (Muse is made by Meta, which debuted it on Sept. 8) Jones responded with a surprisingly small number of recommendations—just a couple of models—with links to go make the purchase. Each of those links provided options to go to a retailer website or buy the vacuum right there in the app.
When I pressed Jones on why it had chosen those particular models, and whether it had looked at review sites specifically, it fessed up that it had looked at both retail sites and review roundups. On the latter, it leaned heavily on a site called Vacuum Wars, which does extensive hands-on testing of this category, and Jones seemed to understand that made it more authoritative. Of the other “review sites” it cited, one was a thin repackaging of Vacuum Wars data, and another was an AI-generated roundup on an aromatherapy blog. Vacuum Wars, I should point out, makes most of its money from the affiliate revenue it gets when its readers transact.
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At this point I should caveat that my example is one test done in one AI app. These personal assistants are brand new, and the AI information economy is still developing. Nothing definitive should be gleaned from this experience. Nonetheless, I think what I discovered is instructive since it shows the vast distance between how product recommendations work in AI vs. the open web, and what that gap means for publishers whose business depends on them.
I think this is worth talking about, now, because I wholeheartedly believe these new apps—or some version of them—will be a success. The idea of the single, all-knowing AI with a simple “talk to me” interface has been the dream since at least the original Star Trek, where the Enterprise computer would somehow magically always know the right context to give the best and most precise answer. The AI platforms have been heading this way, with Anthropic discarding the Chat/Cowork toggle, and OpenAI’s move to sunset custom GPTs being the latest indicators. Everything is pointed toward a singular AI experience.
Who got left out of the answer
Back to buying my robot vacuum: Muse looking to Vacuum Wars as the most definitive review site is probably appropriate, but it also wasn’t a fair fight. Absent from its considerations were Wirecutter, PCMag, and Consumer Reports, all major review sites that have published roundups of robot vacuums. There are plausible reasons for this: Wirecutter is a New York Times property, PCMag is owned by Ziff Davis, and both are hostile to AI companies substituting their content with AI answers. The Times blocks AI crawlers across the board, and Ziff Davis is suing OpenAI. Consumer Reports is likewise defensive about its content, keeping its full ratings behind a membership. But that’s my inference. Jones never said it was blocked from anything.
I should pause for another caveat: What Jones told me it did and what it actually did aren’t necessarily the same thing. It’s possible other sites were in the mix and it never told me, or there may be guardrails in place that it’s not even aware of. So grains of generative salt all around.
Potentially even more revealing were the retail sites that Jones directed me to: Best Buy, Target, and manufacturer retail sites like Dreame. Not present at all: Amazon. That’s because, shortly after Muse made its debut, Amazon blocked the service from transacting on its site. I should note here that Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at Meta Connect on Sept. 23, said transactions in Muse would be a source of revenue, meaning Meta would take a cut of any purchases in the app.
After checking out multiple links that Jones showed me, I saw no tracking specific to the app, though one did carry the manufacturer’s own Facebook campaign tag. Those were links out to retailer sites, and any fee would presumably be collected on purchases made inside the app, out of view. Either they’re tracking purchases in some invisible way, or Meta’s not getting paid yet.
Someone else not getting paid: Vacuum Wars. As I mentioned, transactional links are how the site makes money, and almost all of them link to Amazon, which, again, is a non-presence in Muse. To recap, Vacuum Wars funds its research via Amazon links, Muse takes that research to make recommendations, and then points users to other retailers. Vacuum Wars says affiliate links are its primary source of income, and that it takes no sponsorships or free products from manufacturers.
It’s worse than we thought
All this adds up to an even murkier future for sites that make their dollar on product recommendations. If these personal assistants take off—and I believe they will—the product advice they give will depend on a host of factors, and potentially be balkanized to the point where the path from a published review to an AI recommendation will be more like a labyrinth than a straight line.
Assistants will only direct users to retailers they have access to. For Muse, that’s Shopify, Walmart, and Best Buy, but no Amazon. Amazon blocks nearly every outside assistant, not just Muse, while running its own. Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping carries sponsored prompts in its answers, and its Buy for Me feature checks out on other brands’ sites. OpenAI pulled ChatGPT’s built-in checkout in March and now hands shoppers off to merchants’ own sites and apps. If a review site hopes to get a commission, it would theoretically need a deal for every assistant-and-store pair. The open web needed one link.
The product that your assistant recommends might end up bending to that access. In my case, the products that Jones pointed me towards actually ended up being different from the ones on Vacuum Wars’ definitive list, recommending the Dreame L40 Ultra Gen 2 instead of the Dreame L60 Ultra PE, the model its own summary of the reviews had singled out. It’s unclear why it did that, but everything it recommended had an active checkout page. It’s fair to say the assistant can only recommend what it can sell, so there’s a path for commercial considerations to get in without anyone buying an ad.
With Amazon drawing battle lines, review publishers will have some hard choices to make as these assistants become more popular. Blocking won’t help, as the repackaged Vacuum Wars content reveals: you might block, but reviewclonecashgrab.slop certainly won’t. Your well-researched content could end up driving sales at other retailers. On top of that, Amazon has cut commissions by as much as 50% for some publishers. Amazon is still most people’s first stop to buy online, but its defensive move against Muse shows it’s feeling vulnerable. That leaves reviewers two imperfect options: strike affiliate deals with the stores assistants can reach, or stop chasing the commission and sell the test data itself to the AI companies.
The rules are still being written
Remember: This is one category, and one assistant. And while it’s still early days for AI, it’s basically day one for these new personal everything buddies. Standards for transacting and commissions from AI-based transactions are still emerging, and the Universal Commerce Protocol (Amazon joined its governing body in April) may eventually produce a framework that takes into account all the players, including publishers.
But make no mistake: there’s still a lot to hammer out. As AI assistants take on a more central role in our lives, they’ll begin to abstract away the customer journey—comparing different products or services, filtering them by what’s important to you, and getting the best price. There’s money to be made at every stage, and the irony of the AI era is that we’re starting from a point where the parties tasked with doing the unbiased and thorough research are the ones who are the most shut out.
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| # | Наименование новости | Тональность | Информативность | Дата публикации |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Meta’s Muse AI agent is a clever little bastard | 0 | 10.61 | 13-10-2026 |
| 2 | Why every AI launch now makes the backlash worse | 0 | 17.38 | 18-09-2026 |
| 3 | Robotic vac-mop cuts a full day of housework off the schedule: Review | 0 | 10.83 | 09-05-2026 |
| 4 | The housecleaning is free—but it will cost you your most intimate data | -2 | 6 | 28-06-2026 |
| 5 | Will your robotic vacuum snitch on you? What home devices mean for privacy and the law | 0 | 8.82 | 19-09-2026 |
| 6 | The AI Hype Reckoning Is Upon Us | -3 | 6 | 09-07-2026 |
| 7 | Top developers are shifting from chatbots to physical AI. Here’s why | 0 | 5 | 25-06-2026 |
| 8 | You know OpenAI and Nvidia. These are the AI companies building everything else | 0 | 7 | 26-06-2026 |
| 9 | Painters, nursing assistants, and more: Microsoft's top 10 most AI-safe careers | 0 | 7 | 31-07-2025 |
| 10 | Agentic Commerce Is Here: What Does It Mean for Your Store? | 0 | 5.78 | 10-07-2026 |