ChatGPT: "Get me a new dishwasher"... but Amazon banned it from getting results!

I was astonished this evening when I was exercising my ChatGPT Agent, partly as an experiment and partly because I'm seriously on the hunt for an integrated dishwasher.

I specifically asked ChatGPT to look for this on Amazon UK.

It couldn't.

The agent tried quite a few different ways and was constantly met with a 'not here, no thank you,' response from Amazon.

Which means – conversely - I was met with 'not here, no thank you'.

This is deeply, deeply frustrating. And it's really exciting to experience such novel feelings.

Ordinarily I don't think I'd care. But I had tasked Agent to find me some useful results. I'd given a bit of a criteria of what I was looking for. I didn't think I'd find it such a personal frustration.

Of course, I would imagine Amazon is aiming – expecting, nay, REQUIRING – that I would go to their site and press buttons with their... what's it called? Albert? Or something? Their chatbot in their app - the one that routinely gets in the way a lot.

Let me go and find the name.

Ah yes, Rufus.

You're not going to get that far, Amazon, blocking my agents.

You see I had given some thought to using very.co.uk or AO.com. But, no, I opted for blind loyalty thanks to Prime and dozens of years of habit – and was rudely snapped out of it by a simple NO ENTRY sign.

So guess what Amazon? I'm not buying that dishwasher from you: Here was the instruction I issued to ChatGPT Agent just a few moments ago.

It's already whirring away and I shall deliberately make sure to buy through these vendors instead.

In fact, like 800M other people, I think I might actually see what standard ChatGPT has to offer in terms of recommendations.

Instead of apparently banning my Agent from using the site, why don't you consider facilitating its journey and making it faster?

Ah but you can't. That's right. Because then you'll ceed to the upstart OpenAI. Or so you think.

I don't think protectionist approaches are the way ahead.

Although let's be clear, I must be one of a handful of individuals having made such a request to ChatGPT Agent this week... right?

Equally it's highly possible that this just a simple technical mistake. Although I have to say, every other website it's been visiting seems to be working fine: