I’ve been writing about money since 1991. In that time I’ve watched a parade of new technology promise to make shopping cheaper.
Mostly it made shopping faster. That isn’t the same thing.
Here’s what’s different now. On June 3, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted that “bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time” in the internet’s history. He’d predicted the crossover would happen in 2027.
Cloudflare’s own numbers put automated requests at about 57% of the total, against roughly 43% from humans.
Those aren’t spam bots. They’re AI agents running errands for people — reading, comparing, and increasingly buying.
Which raises a question nobody’s asking loudly enough. If the web is being rebuilt for machines, what happens to the price you see?
The web stopped being built for you
George Lee, co-head of the Goldman Sachs Global Institute, laid out the shift in Fortune last month. His argument is that AI agents can comparison shop at a speed and scale no human can match.
He expects that to make dynamic pricing more widespread. He also floats something stranger: auction pricing at scale, where your agent solicits bids on every sweater and light bulb and makes stores compete in real time.
That’s the optimistic version. Your robot haggles, you win.
But notice the timing problem. The machines rebuilding the storefront are already here. The agent working for you isn’t — not fully, not yet.
What the price tag already knows about you
Start with what’s documented rather than predicted.
In January 2025, the FTC released early findings from a study of the intermediary firms that set prices on behalf of retailers. Staff found that behavior as small as mouse movements on a page, or items you leave sitting unpurchased in a cart, can be tracked and used to tailor your pricing.
Precise location and browser history showed up in the findings too.
Then on Aug. 19 of this year, the FTC proposed an enforcement policy statement on what it calls personalized pricing — using your personal data to set a price based on what a company thinks you’re willing to spend.
Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s framing was blunt. When you see a listed price, you expect “the same price that everyone else sees,” not a retailer’s estimate of your tolerance.
Now read the fine print. The FTC says plainly that it doesn’t have the legal authority to ban personalized pricing in all circumstances. What it can police is whether a company tells you.
That’s a disclosure rule, not a price cap. Big difference for your wallet.
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The dispute is real, and both sides have a point
Airlines are where this got loud.
In July 2025, Senators Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal pressed Delta over its planned use of AI in pricing, warning it could push fares to each traveler’s personal “pain point.”
Delta pushed back hard. It told the senators that “Our ticket pricing never takes into account personal data.”
The airline does use AI in revenue management, through a partnership with a company called Fetcherr, and had said it planned to deploy the technology across 20% of its domestic network. Its position is that demand-based pricing and personal-data pricing are two different animals.
That distinction is legitimate. Airlines have priced by demand for decades.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said his department would investigate any carrier that priced seats individually.
So there’s no proven case of an airline charging you more because of who you are. There’s a regulator, a cabinet secretary and three senators circling the possibility. Treat it as unsettled, not as scandal.
Five moves that work right now
1. Price it twice, two ways. Check the item logged into your account, then again in a private window — ideally on a different device or network. If the two numbers differ, you’ve learned something about that retailer.
2. Use the countermeasures the FTC itself named. The commission noted that informed shoppers might use a virtual private network or a private browsing session, or simply avoid retailers that price this way. When the agency policing the practice tells you how to dodge it, take the hint.
3. In New York, look for the label. The state’s Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act took effect Nov. 10, 2025. Under General Business Law 349-a, a covered business must post a clear notice beside the price reading: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” The attorney general has asked New Yorkers to report businesses that skip it.
4. Don’t hand your agent the card. Plenty of AI shopping tools now offer to complete checkout for you. Keep the approval step turned on. An agent that buys without asking is an agent that can’t be comparison shopped.
5. Say something before Friday. Public comments on the FTC’s proposed statement close Sept. 18, 2026. It’s a short form, and pricing rules get written by whoever bothers to show up.
The bottom line
The technology isn’t the villain here. AI genuinely can save you money — I’ve written about seven ways it can cut hundreds off a trip and how one reader used it to cut $2,340 in expenses. The same shift is already showing up in grocery aisles, where digital shelf labels let stores change a price instantly.
The problem is the gap. Retailers have had years to point algorithms at your wallet. You’ve had a few months to point one back.
Until that evens out, the cheapest thing you own is skepticism. Check the price twice. Assume the number was built for you, personally, and not as a favor.
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