EBay adds new AI agent policy to its website
EBay has updated the underlying code of its sprawling e-commerce platform to include new guidelines governing how AI agents and large language models can interact with its site, making it the latest retailer to set such rules.
The e-commerce giant’s new “Robot & Agent Policy” is now visible in the robots.txt file of its website, according to a review of the page conducted by Modern Retail. Robots.txt files are a standard tool that websites use to give instructions to automated crawlers like search engines. The new line states: “Automated scraping, buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review is strictly prohibited.” Restrictions outlined in robots.txt files are advisory rather than enforceable by law, but they act as signposts that outside agents and LLMs are expected to follow.
The new “Robots & Agent Policy” appears to have been added within the past month or so, as the language was not present in a screenshot of eBay’s robot.txt page dated Oct. 6, according to an archived version of the company’s website.
Beyond the main domain, eBay has also tightened its policy by updating the robots.txt file on its dedicated cart subdomain, cart.ebay.com. That version now explicitly blocks all automated agents from interacting with users’ shopping carts, with the exception of Google’s shopping bot, which is allowed access. An archived version of the file suggests the language was added around July or August.
The presence of these directives in the robots.txt files means that compliant bots — ranging from simple web crawlers to advanced large language models — will be explicitly instructed not to access or manipulate the checkout process. The restriction is designed to signal that unauthorized automation around purchasing is off-limits. After this story was published, eBay updated its robots.txt file to add explicit blocks against bots from companies including Perplexity, Anthropic, Amazon and a few others.
“We are actively working to ensure AI bots are optimally accessing our site, as well as reviewing content and revising to ensure it is modular, clear and well-structured to be better understood by LLMs, such as structuring content in bulleted FAQ format,” an eBay spokesperson said in a statement to Modern Retail. “We are also ensuring our reporting tools are updated to reflect this new traffic channel so we can test and measure the outcome of our efforts.”
“EBay is doing is what every other retailer is going to do, which is say they’re OK to work with AI companies that agreed on a partnership, and that [it’s] not OK to work with anyone else,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, independent e-commerce analyst.
It’s the latest example of how e-commerce companies are setting up guardrails against unsanctioned third-party shopping agents.Last week, retail giant Walmart added “Assistant Guidance” to its “llms.txt,” a rare file format compared to robots.txt, which almost all websites have, that tells LLMs and AI agents how they should interact with a particular website. The change was first spotted by Kaziukėnas, who posted a screenshot on LinkedIn. Walmart’s llms.txt page prohibits agents from performing any transactional functions. In October, Walmart inked a deal with OpenAI to sell its wares directly within ChatGPT. Since Kaziukėnas posted about the guidelines, the file has been deleted. Walmart did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Modern Retail about the file.
Amazon has repeatedly added restrictions to its website code restricting shopping agents from OpenAI, Google and more, Modern Retail previously reported. On the company’s latest earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon is “having conversations” with third-party shopping agents and expects it will “find ways to partner” over time. But he also said that many existing AI shopping agents provide inaccurate pricing, delivery and inventory information. In November, Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI over its new Comet browser, which lets users ask an AI agent to find and buy items on Amazon.
Rather than naming particular AI companies, like Amazon has done, eBay’s “Robots & Agent Policy” applies broadly to automated agents. But eBay’s policy warns that “unauthorized use of automated agents in checkout may result in legal action under our User Agreement.”
Earlier this year, Shopify also introduced a “Robots & Agent” policy prohibiting automated bots, including “‘buy-for-me’” agents that complete payment “without a final human review step.” The wording of eBay’s new policy is strikingly similar in wording to Shopify’s guidelines.
EBay, for its part, says it’s investing heavily in agentic commerce in which AI agents autonomously complete purchases on a user’s behalf. The company has been “testing a variety of agentic experiences in search and shopping,” CEO Jamie Iannone said on the company’s latest earnings call in October. “This includes both on eBay agentic experiences like our AI shopping agent pilot and third-party agents from companies like OpenAI.” In January, eBay announced that it would work with OpenAI to test its Operator agent.
Ebay generates the majority of its revenue from its core marketplace business via transaction and listing fees. Ebay also has significant ad revenue driven primarily by Promoted Listings. Like Amazon, it all stems from the massive volume of goods sold by millions of independent merchants on the platform. Still, the 30-year-old e-commerce company is long past its heyday of the early aughts. In the less than two years since it launched in the U.S., live commerce upstart TikTok Shop has already swelled to the size of eBay.
In its latest earnings call, eBay issued a fourth-quarter profit forecast that missed Wall Street expectations. Gross merchandise volume climbed 10% to $20.1 billion during the third quarter, driven by growth in the collectibles category, a key focus of eBay’s, especially as newcomers like Whatnot take market share. EBay has also started pouring resources into AI tools, including features to help speed up and simplify the seller process, as it competes with other marketplaces like Amazon that have similarly leaned into AI-driven product offerings.
This story has been updated to add a line in the fifth paragraph noting that eBay amended its robots.txt file to include explicit blocks against bots from companies Perplexity, Anthropic, Amazon and more. These blocks were added after the original story was published. A previous version of this story was also updated to include a statement from eBay, which was received after publication.