India, October 06, 2026: FTA Global has released its FTA Agent Readiness Study 2026, revealing that Indian ecommerce websites have an average AI agent readiness score of 43 out of 100, with only a handful of sites fully prepared for the growing role of AI agents in online shopping journeys.
The study assessed 50 Indian ecommerce websites and found that AI agents completed 80% of 450 assigned shopping tasks. The highest-scoring sites were boAt (95/100), Flipkart (92/100), Mamaearth (92/100), Moglix (92/100), and Truemeds (91/100), representing sectors including electronics, marketplaces, beauty, B2B ecommerce, and pharmacy. These sites generally enabled agent access to content, provided key information via server-side HTML, and used structured product data with details such as price and stock.
Key barriers to AI agent success
The research showed that unclear information was a more significant obstacle than technical blocking. Of 92 failed tasks, 26 were due to answers not being clearly stated on the website, while 13 failed because content required JavaScript. Only 11 failures resulted from blocking or site errors. Despite 21 of the 50 sites blocking FTA Global’s generic cloud crawler, real AI agents still completed 77% of tasks on these sites, compared to 82% on sites that did not block the crawler.
Return and delivery information was often missing from structured data: only 3 out of 24 product pages included return policy details in their schema, and just 2 included delivery information. The study also found that AI agents sometimes disagreed when website policies were complex or contradictory, with all three agents returning the same return-window answer on 29 of 50 sites, but differing on 13 sites.
Scoring and assessment methodology
Of 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 Study 2026 evaluated websites on four dimensions: Reach, Read, Understand, and Act. The Trust pillar was excluded as it requires human review.
The study was conducted in two parts: FTA Global crawled 50 Indian ecommerce websites on September 26, 2026, to examine accessibility, server-side content, structured data, interactive elements, and emerging AI standards. On September 27, 2026, Claude, GPT, and Gemini AI agents were each given three shopping tasks across all 50 sites, resulting in 450 real-agent tasks. The 50 sites represent a cross-section of leading Indian ecommerce businesses and are not a ranking by revenue.
Recommendations for ecommerce brands
FTA Global recommends that ecommerce businesses prioritise clarity and accessibility of essential shopping information, such as making delivery charges and return windows explicit, ensuring product details are available without JavaScript, keeping robots.txt rules accessible to AI agents, and reviewing firewall and CDN configurations.
Senthil Kumar Hariram, Founder and Managing Director of FTA Global, said, “AI agents are changing what it means for an ecommerce website to be discoverable. It is no longer enough for a product page to work for a human who can interpret a layout or understand a complicated return policy. An AI agent needs the information to be accessible, explicit and consistent. Our study shows that some of the biggest barriers are basic questions such as what is the price, what does delivery cost, and what is the return window. As AI agents become part of the buying journey, brands will need to design their digital experiences for both humans and machines.”
Background on FTA Global
FTA Global is a search engineering company with over 80 professionals across Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram. Its advisory board includes members from retail, ecommerce, BFSI, life sciences, healthcare, education, aviation, and technology, as well as professors from George Washington University in the USA.
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