At Connect 2026 on September 23, Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang announced that Muse, the company’s personal AI agent, will now browse, compare and complete purchases on behalf of users across ten named retailers (Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, Ulta, Gap, Wayfair, American Eagle Outfitters, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Fanatics and Michael Kors), the entire Shopify catalog, and soon Expedia and Instacart. Payments route through Stripe’s Link, Shop Pay and PayPal. For consumer brands, this is the moment the shelf moved.

Muse only launched September 8 and briefly overtook ChatGPT atop Apple’s App Store. Meta shares climbed 4.5% Thursday on a Mizuho buy note, and more than 25% since Muse was announced. Mark Zuckerberg described the business model bluntly: Meta is “making Muse free for a huge number of tokens, with the expectation that over time we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions.” That’s the Taboola Realize ID launch thesis, at platform scale.

The competitive backdrop is legible: Amazon blocked Meta’s assistant from its store, saying “continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use.” Meta simply signed the retailers directly.

For small B2C brands, agent selection is now the funnel. As Peec AI put it, “being recommended by an answer engine is one thing, being the option a personal agent actually selects and pays for is another.” Peec’s Malte Landwehr called tracking Muse Spark “is the closest approximation brands have to estimate their performance in Muse.” Over 1,500 developer applications arrived in under a week.

Muse selects brands whose published signals are current, structured and consistent, the same shift local businesses are seeing in SOCi’s AI discovery survey. LemonLime prepares that content work proactively, without asking an owner to run a new workflow.

Sources