{"schemaVersion":1,"qualityContract":{"title":"Research Report Quality Contract & Publish Template v1","version":"2026-summer.public-v1","path":"tasks/specs/research-report-quality-contract-v1.md"},"reportName":"Agent Access Friction Index","slug":"agent-access-friction-index","releaseLabel":"Summer 2026","methodologyVersion":"2026-summer.public-v1","generatedAt":"2026-05-25T16:01:25.453Z","paths":{"canonical":"/resources/research/agent-access-friction-index","methodology":"/resources/research/agent-access-friction-index/methodology","aggregateCsv":"/resources/research/agent-access-friction-index/agent-access-friction-index-summer-2026.csv","reportJson":"/resources/research/agent-access-friction-index/report.json","reportJsonDownload":"/resources/research/agent-access-friction-index/report-json","ogImage":"/api/og/research-report/agent-access-friction-index"},"headline":{"metric":"access_friction_observed","label":"Agent access friction observed","tier":"headline","denominatorLabel":"Frozen scanned storefront corpus","evaluableN":500,"findingN":210,"alpha":null,"accuracy":null,"flaggedN":null,"nonFindingN":null,"caveat":"Deterministic access and crawl-status classification. Access friction is not counted as confirmed breakage.","rate":0.42,"ciLow":0.3775,"ciHigh":0.4637,"statement":"210 of 500 scanned Shopify storefronts produced access friction before product, policy, or checkout truth could be evaluated.","interpretation":"The finding is an evaluability constraint. It makes no store-specific reach, ranking, recommendation, or revenue claim."},"corpus":{"publicDescription":"For this report, StoreSteady evaluated a frozen corpus of 500 Shopify storefronts.","selectionRule":"Frozen external retail Shopify storefront corpus selected before analysis; no merchant-identifying examples are published.","freezeTimestamp":"2026-05-21T22:00:01.570Z","evaluationWindow":"2026-05-23T16:50:03.820Z to 2026-05-23T23:24:45.338Z","scannedStoreN":500,"fieldsCollected":["crawl terminal status","robots and crawl-blocked status","classified-page availability","detector-level non-evaluability","access-friction reason code"]},"evidenceFunnel":[{"label":"Frozen corpus","value":"500","detail":"Shopify storefronts entered the public research frame."},{"label":"Access friction observed","value":"210","detail":"Stores with crawler, robots, or access-friction status before detector truth could be evaluated."},{"label":"Crawl failed without classified pages","value":"208","detail":"Largest deterministic reason class in the published access-friction table."},{"label":"Robots-blocked crawl","value":"2","detail":"Stores blocked crawling before enough classified evidence was collected."}],"metricQuality":[{"metric":"access_friction_observed","label":"Agent access friction observed","tier":"headline","denominatorLabel":"Frozen scanned storefront corpus","evaluableN":500,"findingN":210,"alpha":null,"accuracy":null,"flaggedN":null,"nonFindingN":null,"caveat":"Deterministic access and crawl-status classification. Access friction is not counted as confirmed breakage.","rate":0.42,"ciLow":0.3775,"ciHigh":0.4637},{"metric":"crawl_failed_without_classified_pages","label":"Crawl failed without classified pages","tier":"supporting","denominatorLabel":"Frozen scanned storefront corpus","evaluableN":500,"findingN":208,"alpha":null,"accuracy":null,"flaggedN":null,"nonFindingN":null,"caveat":"Deterministic crawl outcome; not a confirmed product, policy, or checkout finding.","rate":0.416,"ciLow":0.3736,"ciHigh":0.4597},{"metric":"crawl_blocked_by_robots_without_classified_pages","label":"Robots blocked crawl before classified pages","tier":"supporting","denominatorLabel":"Frozen scanned storefront corpus","evaluableN":500,"findingN":2,"alpha":null,"accuracy":null,"flaggedN":null,"nonFindingN":null,"caveat":"Robots restriction is reported as access friction, not as breakage.","rate":0.004,"ciLow":0.0011,"ciHigh":0.0145},{"metric":"not_evaluable_for_detector","label":"Detector non-evaluability","tier":"limitation","denominatorLabel":"Frozen scanned storefront corpus","evaluableN":500,"findingN":290,"alpha":null,"accuracy":null,"flaggedN":null,"nonFindingN":null,"caveat":"Kept separate from access friction and confirmed findings.","rate":0.58,"ciLow":0.5363,"ciHigh":0.6225}],"detectorPrimitives":[],"attributeReadiness":null,"sections":[{"id":"what-measured","heading":"What StoreSteady Measured","paragraphs":["StoreSteady measured whether the public scan could collect enough storefront evidence to evaluate product, policy, and checkout truth without bypassing robots rules, login walls, anti-bot controls, or challenge pages.","The headline denominator is the frozen scanned corpus, not the smaller set of stores that were fully evaluable for confirmed Breakage findings."],"bullets":["Access friction is separate from confirmed breakage.","Not-evaluable detector outcomes are separate from hard access friction.","Reason classes are aggregate-only and publish no store names, domains, URLs, crawl text, or raw responses."]},{"id":"not-measured","heading":"What StoreSteady Did Not Measure","paragraphs":["This report does not measure recommendation probability, answer placement, placement position, conversion impact, or financial impact.","It also does not claim that any specific AI agent cannot access a named store. The report measures whether StoreSteady could evaluate public evidence under a non-circumventing crawl protocol."]},{"id":"quality-gates","heading":"Quality Gates","paragraphs":["The access-friction metrics are deterministic status classifications. Judge alpha is not applicable because no LLM judgment is used for these rows.","Every rate uses its own evaluable denominator and Wilson 95% confidence interval. Access friction, detector non-evaluability, runner failures, and confirmed findings remain separate."]}],"limitations":["Access friction is evaluability friction, not proof of lower ranking, lower recommendation probability, or financial impact.","The report does not attempt to bypass robots restrictions, anti-bot controls, login walls, checkout gates, or challenge pages.","Reason classes are aggregate counts only; public artifacts intentionally omit store names, raw domains, raw URLs, raw crawl text, and raw AI responses."],"sources":[{"label":"StoreSteady published aggregate report JSON","url":"https://www.storesteady.com/resources/research/agentic-commerce-breakage-index/report.json","note":"Published aggregate artifact used as the source of calibrated public-report counts."},{"label":"OpenAI crawler documentation","url":"https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots","note":"Context for AI crawler and robots controls; not used as a ranking or reach claim."},{"label":"Google robots.txt guidance","url":"https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro","note":"Crawler-access context for robots restrictions and non-circumventing evaluation."},{"label":"Google merchant listing structured data","url":"https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/merchant-listing","note":"Public product-structured-data context for merchant listing evidence."},{"label":"OpenAI product feed specification","url":"https://developers.openai.com/commerce/specs/file-upload/products","note":"Product-data freshness context; not used as a connected-merchant-data audit."},{"label":"Shopify product taxonomy","url":"https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/details/product-category","note":"Shopify product-data context for product categorization and storefront facts."}],"versionHistory":[{"version":"2026-summer.public-v1","date":"2026-05-25","change":"Initial public report from the published Summer 2026 Breakage aggregate artifacts."}],"redactionPolicy":{"aggregateOnly":true,"rowLevelPublicFieldsAreHashed":null,"excludedPublicFields":["store names","raw domains","raw URLs","raw crawl text","raw AI responses","exact promo codes","private feed/admin evidence","merchant-identifying product examples"]}}