# Meta's Muse, Instinct shopping agents don't cite sources

Published: 2026-10-02T20:18:03.331Z · Source: Profound research blog (https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/the-era-of-personal-agents-muse-and-instinct)
Source date: 2026-10-02
Flags: Profound study — vendor-published, small exploratory sample (50 prompts)
Entities: profound

Profound traced Meta's Muse — a personal-agent app that passed 2.5 million downloads after its September 8 launch — through 50 test prompts in one retail category to see how it shops. Browser visits typically surfaced 4 products from 2 merchant sites, while Meta's own product catalog returned roughly 60 products from 30 merchants; final recommendations blended the two, averaging 6 product cards. Neither Muse nor Instinct, a rival agent in private beta built on Shopify's catalog and said to be nearing $1 billion in annualized transaction volume, names the sites it visits by default, per Profound. The firm also measured a 1.6x jump in unverified Meta-webindexer crawler requests to U.S. and Canada retail sites versus the rest of the world in the three weeks after Muse's launch.

Why it matters: Personal shopping agents are a visibility surface distinct from answer engines — they browse and buy without showing their sources, so catalog placement and machine-readable product pages now matter as much as being cited.

## What this answers

**Do AI shopping agents like Meta's Muse show their sources?**

No — Profound found that by default, neither Muse nor the rival agent Instinct names the websites it visits when gathering real-time shopping information.

**How can a website show up in AI shopping agent recommendations?**

Per Profound, get products into Meta's and Shopify's catalogs, keep the site navigable to a browsing agent via standard semantic HTML, and state clearly who each product is for.


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