AI, E-Commerce Test Limits of the Reasonable Consumer Standard

The rise of e-commerce and data-driven digital advertising is chipping away at the reasonable consumer standard, a foundational legal concept historically used to determine whether business practices are deceptive, consumer law professionals warn.

Courts determine whether a marketing practice was deceptive by assessing whether hypothetical reasonable consumers would have been misled by a particular statement.

But the growth of digital advertising over the last 30 years has fragmented audiences as consumers’ online experiences become increasingly personalized.

As businesses move toward targeting narrower market segments and embrace AI advertising tools that allow them to quickly iterate advertising statements, consumers may have a tougher time showing they were misled, researchers say.

The reasonable consumer standard has been outdated for a long time, “but now you can divide the world up, divide consumers up in such a way that you would be deceiving all these little groups in slightly different ways,” said Lauren Willis, a law professor at Loyola Law School.

When advertising on television and radio was the focus, there was a shared information environment and consumers were exposed to similar messages, said Ceren Canal Aruoba, a managing director at consulting firm Berkeley Research Group.

But now “we live in a world of very micro-targeted marketing” where “we all get different types of information” through our individualized social media feeds, she said. “This raises the threshold in many ways in terms of ‘reasonable’ compared to whom and in what context.”

As market segments get smaller and more specific, courts will need to rely on more empirical data like consumer surveys to determine deceptive conduct, Canal Aruoba said. Still, “it will take them a while to understand how this segmentation works,” she said.

And with consumers relying increasingly on AI-generated summaries and outsourcing more of their decision making, “we might eventually down the road stop engaging with advertising ourselves directly,” she said. “The biggest question there is the fundamental question of ‘is the reasonable consumer still the decision maker?’”

AI Shopping Agents

The advent of AI agents that purport to help consumers shop could overcome certain forms of manipulative advertising, said Mark Bartholomew, a law professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law.

“These things could really help us avoid a lot of the pitfalls that are involved with being a human being with all our cognitive limitations, help us avoid being tricked by things like ‘trending now’ or sale prices ending in 99 cents,” Bartholomew said.

Consumers are warming to the idea of AI-assisted shopping tools, according to data from Statista Consumer Insights. In a 2025 survey of thousands of American adults, Statista found that nearly a quarter of consumers aged 18-39 said they like using AI to shop.

McKinsey & Co. estimates agentic commerce could generate up to $1 trillion in revenue by 2030.

Online payment processors like Stripe and Paypal are partnering with tech giants such as OpenAI and Google LLC to develop AI-driven shopping experiences. And e-commerce juggernauts like Amazon.com Inc. and Alibaba Group are building their own AI agents to help consumers shop.

“This is kind of the frontier of consumer markets,” said Rory Van Loo, a professor of law at Boston University School of Law. “The frontier battle is going to be between these AI agents and the sellers who are going to try to undermine them.”

Much of the framework of consumer law was established in an “era of far simpler commerce,” but AI shopping agents change consumers’ relationship to the market, Van Loo said. Consumers might be more trusting because they see these agents as helpers.

“We may need a new legal regime that recognizes that extra vulnerability that consumers are going to have,” he said.

Potential New Frameworks

A legal battle over AI tools on e-commerce platforms is already brewing.

Last year, Amazon sued Perplexity AI Inc. to stop Perplexity’s AI browser agent, Comet, from shopping on consumers’ behalf. The e-commerce giant accused Perplexity’s bot of impersonating human users to get around technological barriers and accessing user accounts without Amazon’s permission in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

The lawsuit could help define the extent to which agentic AI legally can help people perform complex real-world tasks.

Van Loo said consumers should take note of “Amazon’s aggressive resistance to AI tools that are simply trying to help consumers understand an incredibly complicated marketplace.”

The complexity of e-commerce marketplaces and the emergence of agentic AI shopping tools mean “consumer law needs to start acting more like securities law and labor law, both of which recognize that people need help from third parties,” Van Loo said. “The law should make sure those third parties are truly helping and ensure that those third parties have the ability to help the people they’re trying to help.”

AI shopping agents ultimately could shift the reasonable consumer standard because they blur the chain of persuasion, Canal Aruoba said.

Others are less convinced AI shopping agents will cut through manipulative marketing.

“I think requiring consumers to acquire technology to fight technology being used by businesses is not really the way to solve these kinds of problems,” Willis said. “If it’s a tech war, the businesses are going to win.”

A better way to treat digital deception would be to consider the internet as more of a physical place and add “building code elements” akin to stop signs on roads, she said. Creating recognizable visuals like cancellation buttons at digital checkouts could make customers feel more in control, Willis said.