eBay is blocking AI shopping agents like Meta's Muse, and Amazon and Target are building walls too

Third-party AI agents, including Meta's Muse, can no longer browse eBay. Over the past weekend, Muse began reporting that it was blocked from the site and stopped returning links or listing details from the platform. Until recently, that information had been well within reach for tools like it.

The story was reported by The Verge on November 10. A reader told the outlet that for weeks they had been using Muse to put together a daily roundup of watches for sale on sites like eBay, with the link, price, shipping cost and notes on condition and style. The Verge repeated the experiment with other searches. In some cases, the agent sent the user to outside sites that mirrored eBay's listings.

eBay had already changed its user agreement to ban tools such as buy-for-me agents and bots powered by large language models that place orders without human review. Until recently, though, agents like Muse could still browse the site and pull listings.

What eBay says

eBay spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand said by email that AI is present across the entire platform, in discovery, personalization and selling. She did not directly answer whether the company had placed new limits on agents.

"When it comes to third parties, we take a selective approach to how they access and interact with our marketplace. We restrict agent access in some cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on our data," said Sybille St. Arromand, a spokesperson for eBay. "We are in conversations with potential partners and are evaluating ways third-party agents can help new customers discover eBay's unmatched inventory, and our focus is on preserving the trusted end-to-end experience that buyers and sellers expect from eBay."

A divided retail landscape

Retailers are responding in different ways. Amazon blocks outside agents completely, both from browsing and from buying. Target has restrictions that let agents browse in some situations and shut them out in others. Shopify went the other way, opening its catalog of one billion listings so shoppers can set up agents to buy on their behalf.

Part of the caution comes from the fact that retail sites were built to sell to people, with human limitations, not to swarms of bots. In October, the same publication showed that Muse could be used to hold listings on The RealReal, a consignment site for secondhand designer goods, with an agent that kept adding the item to the cart nonstop. The RealReal adjusted its anti-bot system after the story ran.

Usage is still small

It's not clear how common agentic commerce has become, and there are signs that most people aren't using AI this way. Uber said it handled just four rides requested by third-party agents in the third quarter and about 500 Uber Eats orders during Halloween week. DoorDash said it had fulfilled only "several hundred" orders placed by third-party agents, out of 993 million total orders last quarter.

For brand teams, the takeaway is that a product only shows up in an AI agent's answer if the store selling it lets the agent in. When access is cut off, the agent may steer the shopper to another site, as happened with the pages mirroring eBay. For now, the Uber and DoorDash numbers suggest this kind of shopping is still small.