FTA Global has released its Agent Readiness Study 2026, assessing how prepared Indian e-commerce websites are for AI agents that increasingly influence product discovery, comparison and purchasing decisions. The study found that AI agents successfully completed 358 of 450 shopping tasks across 50 ecommerce websites, resulting in an overall completion rate of 80 per cent.
Return-window queries recorded the highest completion rate at 91 per cent, followed by delivery-charge queries at 74 per cent and product and price discovery at 73 per cent. boAt led the study with a score of 95 out of 100, followed by Flipkart, Mamaearth and Moglix at 92 each, while Truemeds scored 91. The strongest-performing websites generally made key information accessible to agents through server-side HTML and structured product data covering details such as pricing and availability.
The study found that unclear information posed a greater challenge than outright website blocking. Of the 92 tasks that agents could not complete, 26 failures were attributed to information that was not clearly stated, while 13 involved content dependent on JavaScript. Only 11 failures resulted from blocking or site errors.
FTA Global also found that generic crawler restrictions did not necessarily prevent major AI agents from completing shopping tasks. While 21 of the 50 websites blocked or failed its generic cloud crawler, real AI agents completed 77 per cent of tasks on websites that fully blocked the crawler, compared with 82 per cent on sites that remained accessible.
The research highlighted gaps in structured e-commerce data, particularly around returns and delivery. Only three of 24 product pages examined included return-policy information in their schema, while just two included delivery details. As a result, AI agents may need to search across policy pages and interpret information that can be unclear or inconsistent.
Policy complexity also affected consistency between AI systems. Claude, GPT and Gemini returned the same answer for return-window queries on 29 of the 50 websites. On 13 sites, however, the agents produced different answers, largely where websites contained multiple or contradictory rules.
Among the 42 sites that could be fully scored, 12 achieved a score of 80 or above, while 18 scored below 20. The FTA Agent Readiness Score assesses websites across four dimensions: Reach, Read, Understand and Act. Trust was excluded from the scoring framework as it requires human review.
Senthil Kumar Hariram, Founder and Managing Director, FTA Global, said e-commerce discoverability is evolving as AI agents become part of the shopping journey. He noted that websites need to provide information that is accessible, explicit and consistent for machines as well as human visitors, particularly around basic purchase considerations such as pricing, delivery costs and return periods.
The study reflects a broader change in how e-commerce businesses need to approach digital visibility. While traditional search optimisation has centred on crawling, indexing and ranking, AI-led discovery also depends on whether an agent can locate, interpret and act on information available on a website.
FTA Global recommends that e-commerce businesses make essential shopping information more explicit, including delivery charges, return windows, product names, prices, stock status and variants. The company also advises businesses to review JavaScript dependencies, robots.txt configurations, firewall settings and CDN rules to ensure that shopping and AI search agents can access relevant information.
The study was conducted across two stages. FTA Global crawled 50 Indian e-commerce websites on September 26, 2026, assessing accessibility, server-side content, structured data, interactive elements and emerging AI standards. On September 27, Claude, GPT and Gemini were given the same three shopping tasks across all 50 sites, generating 450 real-agent tasks.
The selected websites represent leading Indian e-commerce businesses across multiple categories and are not intended to constitute a ranking of the country’s 50 largest ecommerce companies by revenue.
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