Why Muse May Never Need Ads

It didn’t take too long for the app layer to start to respond to Muse. Amazon, of course, already blocked Muse. While it remains to be seen how such dispute gets resolved, we are starting to see app layers amping up their shipping speed. Just yesterday, DoorDash unveiled an AI agent that takes orders inside Apple’s iMessage, and Airbnb rolled out its first real attempt at AI search.

Since this dynamic between general purpose agent such as Muse and vertical specific agents may prove to be a core battleground in the consumer internet companies, let me lay out this dynamic and elaborate my thoughts further on this topic.

Let me start with DoorDash. The idea is that you can simply text DoorDash to get your usual order delivered to the office without ever opening the app. The agent matches your phone number to your DoorDash profile, looks at your order history and preferences, and completes checkout with your stored payment method inside the thread itself. The pilot is reportedly live with 20,000 US users on iOS. Of course, you need to know what exactly you want to order for this to work smoothly. If you don’t know what you are about to order, you would likely be better served by going to the app and browse the restaurants to figure out what exactly you are craving. DoorDash CMO Tim Castree actually said yesterday half of customers arrive at the platform without knowing what they want to order which is bit of a glass half full type story since it does indicate half of the customers can potentially order their meal without needing to open the app if they can just leave a quick prompt to their agent (DoorDash’s own or Muse-like agents) and the agent can take care of it.

There are also some mixed data based on some early data I have seen for DoorDash. From Implicator:

Grocery orders built with Ask DoorDash, the in-app chatbot, had nearly 50% higher basket value than the same consumers’ traditional orders from August through early September 2026. DoorDash has released no comparable figures for the Messages pilot. A Citizens analyst note summarizing Tim Castree’s commentary said people who clicked through to DoorDash from AI chatbots converted at higher rates and filled bigger baskets than standard traffic. Orders from early agent traffic came with baskets two-thirds smaller, the note said.

Nearly half of the chatbot’s restaurant orders from June through August 2026 went to places the customer had never tried. These usage figures are DoorDash’s own

Although DoorDash doesn’t have a connector with Muse yet (which is notable given Tony Xu sits on Meta’s board), Co-founder Andy Fang said DoorDash is in talks with Meta about an official link with Muse. So, DoorDash appears to be running both sides of the trade by building its own agent where users already spend their time while keeping the door open to being a connector inside someone else’s agent. Indeed, it is perhaps too early to commit to a path. Moreover, it actually makes sense for DoorDash to be available in all surfaces possible to increase the utilization of Dasher network even though they obviously would prefer to receive all of their traffic on their own interface.

Airbnb is taking a somewhat more defiant posture. The new AI search lets you switch on a toggle and describe what you want via text or voice, after which the interface generates dynamic filters based on your query. Brian Chesky has deliberately stayed away from a chatbot-like interface. At Skift Global Forum last week, he also put a date on the bigger ambition: “Next year we will launch our agent”, with an interface he described as much richer than a chatbot. In the meantime, Airbnb seems to treat ChatGPT and Muse as distribution channels that send it traffic. Chesky did call AI an existential risk in the same conversation, so he’s well aware of the fact that AI may not be unalloyed good for Airbnb.

Both companies are understandably trying to defend the interface. However, my concern is that the vertical specific agents they build cannot be neutral. DoorDash’s agent is never going to tell me the same burrito bowl is cheaper on Uber Eats, and Airbnb’s agent is never going to check whether the same listing is available at cheaper price on Vrbo, Booking, or the host’s own website. A general purpose consumer agent has no such constraint. As I showed earlier, I can give Muse a standing instruction to always check whether there is a cheaper way to book something, and it will do so without being asked again. A vertical agent may well have a better interface, but a general agent is far more likely to be my advocate across all of them. If consumers come to value the latter, it can be structurally challenging for vertical specific company agents to gain trust that the agent is actually prioritizing customer’s interest.

This is where Meta’s monetization posture becomes quite interesting. At launch, Axios reported there is no advertising within Muse, with Alexandr Wang saying the company is exploring commerce opportunities instead. At Connect, Zuckerberg reportedly did not utter the word “advertising” even once in his keynote. What he did say is that Muse will remain free for a large number of tokens, and that over time “we will profit by taking a small fee from transactions”. The fee would reportedly come from merchants rather than users, but its size and mechanics remain undisclosed.

My hypothesis is that the near-term product Meta is trying to nail is trust. That is, of course, bit of a tall ask for Meta given there does seem to be widespread lack of trust on the company. It is, however, interesting to see that Muse has gained so much hype despite the trust deficit company typically suffers. It is still early days, but there is indeed a strong likelihood that trust may become much more important once users start using these agents at scale and people can understandably have a strong preference for agents that want to do things that are simply in the interest of the users.

But can Meta really scale Muse without inserting ads eventually? Most investors I talk to seem to believe ads are almost inevitable in Muse. I am not so sure. If trust is the decisive advantage over vertical specific agents, I believe there is a high likelihood that we may never see ads in Muse.

If I am going to hand over my emails, logins, and payment credentials to an agent, I need to believe it is working for me and not for the highest bidder. “No ads” is a very strong counter-position, not least against Meta’s own history. Indeed, one would imagine Meta to be the last company on earth to not want to insert ads, but strategically it makes so much sense to me to shun ads on Muse altogether. First of all, it will create a real problem for everyone else entering this space. If Meta sets the norm that a trustworthy personal agent does not carry ads, anyone who needs ads to fund their agent starts to look compromised by comparison, and very few competitors have an ad engine elsewhere to subsidize such a generous free tier. Meta can afford to wait. If Muse becomes the aggregator of aggregators a couple of years down the line, Meta would be in a position to ask for some take rate on much of the economic value flowing through it.

There are a few predictable objections to this thesis that I have been thinking about. The first is that a merchant-paid fee is itself an incentive, so Muse is not truly neutral. I don’t find this too troubling. If every merchant pays whenever a transaction goes through Muse, then Muse should be mostly indifferent to which merchant wins, much like a card network.

Another objection is access. As mentioned earlier, Amazon has blocked Muse. An agent can only shop where it is allowed to, and that is probably the strongest card the app layer still holds. But Meta has since added Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, and Wayfair among others, on top of access to Shopify’s catalog. The bet seems to be that if Meta can aggregate enough demand, the holdouts will eventually feel it. For Amazon, the trade-off is asymmetric in timing. Letting agents in threatens its high-margin ad business right away whereas staying out costs volume only gradually. So, holding out is probably rational today. But logistics is a fixed asset business in which utilization matters a great deal. If Muse remains the dominant consumer agent and more and more orders flow to Walmart and other partners, the calculus on week 100 may look quite different from week one post-Muse launch. In any case, Amazon is highly likely to be anomaly than a norm. Very few companies are as dominant as Amazon is in their vertical, so if one holds out, that demand can be easily diverted to someone who is willing to play ball with Muse.

Perhaps most importantly, “no ads” on Muse may cost Meta far less than it seems at first glance. Meta’s blog post on “How We Built Safety Into Muse” has laid out how Meta may indirectly benefit even if Muse never shares my data directly with Meta’s ad system. From the post:

Muse doesn’t share your conversations or the data in your Virtual Machine with Meta ad systems. That said, there are some legitimate scenarios where how you use Muse can influence the ads you see. When Muse browses the internet, it will appear as your activity, so if you ask Muse to buy a shirt from a clothing designer’s website, that designer might use your visit to show you an ad on Instagram. Similarly, if Muse makes a restaurant reservation for you or helps you find a great product on Facebook Marketplace, that may also indirectly influence the ads you see.

Given this context, I have a strong suspicion that Meta may never feel the need to insert ads inside Muse. In fact, the more I think about it, the more this looks to me like an underappreciated advantage. If an agent’s browsing can inform the ads I see elsewhere, Meta may be one of the very few companies that can monetize a personal agent through advertising without ever showing an ad inside the agent itself. The loop requires two things: a tag on the merchant’s website that registers the visit, and a large owned surface elsewhere on which to serve the resulting ad. Startups such as Instinct has neither. ChatGPT does have an ads business, but its only inventory is ChatGPT itself and its targeting draws on the conversation, which is exactly the trade-off Meta is positioning Muse against. Google is the one company that could replicate the loop given its reach across Search, YouTube, Gmail, and its display network, but an agent that completes the purchase likely replaces the very commercial query Google monetizes best. For Meta, which has always had to infer intent rather than observe it, every Muse errand can be incremental signal. This gives Muse an unusual ability to remain ad-free: Meta can keep ads out of the Muse app and still get paid for it on Facebook and Instagram, which makes delaying direct monetization far cheaper for Meta than for almost anyone else. This also means the indirect monetization of Muse is already happening right now while the direct monetization via transaction take rates can wait until enough demand has been aggregated.

As of today, I still find the apps to be a better experience than asking an agent, so I don’t want to overstate the near-term threat. Building their own agents seems necessary for the vertical specific companies, but I suspect it may not be sufficient for vast majority of them given their structural nepotism towards their own inventories. The key question is perhaps whether consumers eventually want one agent per app or one agent for almost everything that will have a lot more context and data about their lives, interests, and preferences than a vertical agent will ever have. It’s early days, so I wouldn’t want to have a rigid opinion, but Meta has a real shot at aggregating the aggregators.

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