eBay appears to have blocked AI agents, including Meta’s Muse, from browsing the platform, the latest hurdle in the AI agent race.
A reader tells The edge which for several weeks has had its Muse agent search and curate a daily summary of watches for sale on platforms like eBay, including a link to listings, prices, shipping details, and relevant notes on condition or style. This weekend, however, Muse was unable to pull any links or details from eBay, and Muse said it was blocked from the site. The edge I was able to recreate the experience using other search requests, and in some cases we found that Muse was directing users to external sites that mirrored eBay listings.
Shopping is frequently invoked as an area where AI agents can augment or improve the human-powered experience. Tech companies tout the use of agents to book travel, find deals, and even purchase goods and services on behalf of humans. But AI agents are regularly blocked from accessing retailers’ sites, calling into question how useful they can really be.
eBay previously updated its user agreement to prohibit the use of tools such as “buying agents for me” and “LLM-controlled bots” that place orders without human review. However, until recently, agents like Muse could browse the site and obtain user listings.
AI is being integrated throughout the platform for the discovery, personalization and selling process, eBay spokeswoman Sybille St. Arromand said. The edge in an email. St. Arromand declined to directly answer whether eBay recently imposed new limits on AI agents.
“When it comes to third parties, we take a selective approach to how they access and interact with our marketplace. We have restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on our data,” St. Arromand said. “We have ongoing conversations with potential partners and are evaluating ways third-party agents could help new customers discover eBay’s unparalleled inventory, and our focus is preserving the trusted end-to-end experience that buyers and sellers have come to expect from eBay.”
Meta declined to comment.
Retailers and service providers that have eagerly added AI features to their platforms have shown varying levels of comfort with third-party agents accessing their sites. At one end of the spectrum is Amazon, which completely blocks browsing or purchases from third-party agents. Some retailers like Target have restrictions that allow agents to navigate successfully in some cases but get blocked in others. Meanwhile, Shopify has opened up its catalog of one billion listings so buyers can set up their agents to purchase items on their behalf.
Including agents in the e-commerce mix has the potential to change the way people shop online, in part because retail sites largely assume they are selling to humans, with human limitations, and not to swarms of robots. For example, The edge discovered in October that someone could use Muse to hold product listings hostage on The RealReal, a secondhand designer consignment site, by having an agent continually add the product to the user’s cart. The RealReal updated its bot system after The edgeIt is informing.
But as retailers modify their sites in real time to handle bots, it’s unclear how widespread agent trading is. In fact, there are indications that most people do not use AI in this way. Uber said it made just four rides through third-party agents in the third quarter and only about 500 Uber Eats orders during Halloween week. DoorDash similarly said it only fulfilled “several hundred” orders placed through third-party agents. It reported 993 million total orders last quarter.
