eBay updated its user agreement to require that customers not use “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review” on its site, unless the company specifically grants approval. The previous version of the agreement contained a general prohibition on the use of “any robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools,” but did not mention AI agents or LLMs by name.
The new agreement specifically blocks agentic shopping agents, including those from Google, Amazon, and Perplexity. However eBay does allow for bots with prior permission such as OpenAI.
The updates follow eBay’s December changes to its robots.txt file, which added a new “Robot & Agent Policy” to the file. However, as Ars Technica points out:
“…restrictions in robots.txt files are basically honor-system suggestions. By adding the language to its User Agreement, eBay can now more easily take legal action against users or companies who violate the policy.”
Ars also notes that although eBay is making a concerted effort to block outside agents, its new User Agreement policy does not prevent the company from developing its own AI shopping tools. CEO Jamie Iannone said on an October earnings call that the company is “testing a variety of agentic experiences in search and shopping.”
The agreement’s use of the phrase “without prior express permission of eBay” also lends to the idea that eBay has more agentic partnerships in the works, but like any major platform in 2026, it wants to be in the driver’s seat.
