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

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.