Why eBay may not want to be an AI agent's catalogue

eBay appears to have blocked AI agents, including Meta’s Muse, from browsing its marketplace, The Verge reported on Tuesday.The Verge, eBay appears to have shut the door on third-party AI agents (Mia Sato, 10 Nov 2026). A reader whose daily Muse digest of watches stopped pulling eBay listings over the weekend saw Muse saying it was blocked from the site, and The Verge re-created the result. In some cases, The Verge wrote, Muse sent users to outside sites that mirrored eBay listings instead.

eBay has not confirmed a change. It declined to directly answer whether it recently imposed new limits on AI agents, according to The Verge. Spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand told The Verge: “We have restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on our data”.

Those are eBay’s stated reasons. The deeper one is economic, and it applies to every large retailer.

No retailer wants to be a catalogue

The analyst Eric Seufert set out the argument in an essay titled “Agentic commerce is a mirage”, published in September 2025.Eric Seufert, Agentic commerce is a mirage (Mobile Dev Memo). Its core is that the data a sale produces can be worth as much as the sale. “Amazon derives as much, if not more, value from the user-level data artifacts created by a transaction than from the transaction itself,” he wrote.

On that view, the sales a retailer gives up by turning agents away are small. Seufert called them “likely marginal at best,” adding that the opposite view “completely discounts the value of the data generated by owning the relationship and the transaction”. He asked: “why would Amazon or Shopify yield the agentic commerce experience to a third-party product that disintermediates them from their users?”

When an outside agent shops for a customer, the retailer still holds the stock, ships the parcel and handles the return. The agent holds the customer: it knows what was searched, compared and rejected, and it decides where the next order goes. The retailer is left as a catalogue that someone else’s software reads.

Large platforms would rather run the agent themselves, Seufert wrote: “They prefer to layer their own agents into the retail experience, where they control the surface area and can monetize it with advertising”. His conclusion was that an independent shopping agent “runs counter to the incentive structure of the largest retail platforms”. He does not argue that agents will fail. Of agentic commerce itself, he wrote: “I see it as inevitable.”

From checkout to browsing

eBay had already drawn half of that line. Its robots file, the public page where a site tells automated visitors what they may do, has a section titled Robots & Agent Policy that says: “Checkouts are strictly for human users.”eBay robots.txt, Robots & Agent Policy. The policy prohibits scraping, buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots and any flow that places orders without human review. Its version label is dated August 2026.

Until recently, The Verge wrote, agents like Muse could still browse the site and pull listings for users. That is the distinction Seufert drew in his essay: “Amazon’s restrictions begin at the point of discovery (because it wants to retain advertising primacy) and Shopify’s start at the point of purchase (because it wants to retain transaction primacy).” eBay’s written rule stopped agents at checkout. What The Verge describes would move eBay’s line forward to browsing, the point where Amazon draws it.

The same robots file already lists Meta’s crawler, meta-externalagent, with GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot in a group barred from all but help and seller pages. A robots file is a request to automated visitors, not a technical barrier.

What eBay has at stake

eBay’s own figures show what sits on the pages an agent would read in a shopper’s place. Chief executive Jamie Iannone said on eBay’s third-quarter earnings call that “85% of our traffic is organic” and that “Enthusiast buyers represent over 70% of our GMV,” meaning the value of goods sold.eBay Q3 2026 earnings call transcript (Motley Fool).

Chief financial officer Peggy Alford said on the same call: “Total advertising revenue was $607 million in the third quarter”. She said first-party ads, the ones sellers buy on eBay’s own pages, grew 16% to $575 million. Those ads are paid for by sellers to reach shoppers browsing eBay, and a shopper whose agent does the browsing does not see them.

eBay’s case for letting some in

eBay does not describe a blanket refusal. Iannone said on the call: “As it pertains to third party experiences, we are continuing to test and learn”. He added: “We are open to approaches that improve discovery of our unmatched inventory,” while keeping the end-to-end experience customers expect.

Traffic from AI agents and assistants is small, Iannone said: “it is very, very small today”. But he said it brings “new and reactivated buyers at a higher rate than other similar channels,” and that “roughly half of the new buyers from those referrals come directly to eBay” for later purchases. St. Arromand told The Verge that eBay is “evaluating ways third-party agents could help new customers discover eBay’s unmatched inventory”.

That fits the economics above. An agent that sends a new buyer to eBay builds eBay’s relationship with that buyer; an agent that buys in the buyer’s place keeps it.

Closing the door costs little today

Agent orders are tiny so far, by the companies’ own accounts. Uber chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy said on Uber’s third-quarter call that “The volumes coming from AI agents for Uber Eats were around 500,” and that rides fulfilled from agents came to “a grand total of 4”.Uber Q3 2026 earnings call transcript (Motley Fool). Both figures were for Halloween week, when Uber said “we did just around 320 million trips”. DoorDash chief executive Tony Xu said on DoorDash’s call that it had seen “maybe several hundred orders in total from some of these third-party agents”.DoorDash Q3 2026 earnings call transcript (Motley Fool).

Where the big retailers are landing

Amazon blocks external agents from browsing or shopping, The Verge wrote, while Target lets them browse in some cases and Shopify has opened its catalog so agents can buy on shoppers’ behalf. Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said on Amazon’s third-quarter call that the company anticipates working with horizontal agents but expects Alexa for Shopping to be “the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon”.Amazon Q3 2026 earnings call transcript (Motley Fool). Asked whether outside agents are hurting Amazon’s ad business, he said: “The answer is no.”

Walmart has written its terms down. Its October release lists “conversational commerce integrations with Muse, ChatGPT, Gemini and others”.Walmart, Making It Possible for Agents to Shop on Behalf of Customers. Its agentic access terms route agent-to-agent shopping through Walmart’s own agent, Sparky, and require a customer’s approval before every checkout made any other way.Walmart Agentic Access Terms. They also bar agents from using Walmart data “to generate content, target advertising, create synthetic data, train models, or produce commercial analytics”.

That is the kind of data Seufert says is worth as much as the sale itself. Walmart lets agents in and keeps it. eBay, by The Verge’s account, has so far chosen to keep agents out, and says it is still evaluating ways they could help. Meta declined to comment to The Verge.