eBay has long tried to stop other companies from scraping its site, and in the fall, it quietly added “buy for me” AI agents to the list of prohibited crawlers in its robots.txt file. This week, eBay informed customers by email that it was updating its User Agreement to prohibit them from using agentic-shopping technology – such as the Buy for Me feature Amazon introduced last April – though it didn’t single out any agents by name in the email or new user agreement.
eBay isn’t only trying to block Amazon’s agentic-shopping tools – it updated its robots.txt file to add blocks against bots and explicitly named companies including Perplexity, Anthropic, and a few others in addition to Amazon, according to Modern Retail.
But eBay made one exception: it allows Google’s shopping bot to access its site.
Amazon’s Buy for Me feature grabbed headlines earlier this month when sellers realized Amazon had scraped their shops and was in some cases making purchases on their sites on behalf of Amazon’s customers. Sellers who discovered the activity were forced to opt out if they didn’t like it, even if they didn’t sell on Amazon and had no relationship with the marketplace.
eBay provided a statement to Modern Retail stating it was actively working to ensure AI bots were optimally accessing its site and reviewing content. “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,” it told the publication.
eBay also announced in Wednesday’s email that changes to the user agreement included changes to the arbitration clause as follows:
- We clarified the scope of the class action waiver.
- We clarified the process for opting out of the agreement to arbitrate.
- We updated the physical address to which notices for informal dispute resolution, arbitration demands, and notices for opting out of arbitration must be sent.
The changes come in section 19 (“Legal Disputes”) under part B. (“Agreement to Arbitrate”) and after the section mandating Informal Dispute Resolution and Waiver of Jury Trial.
The updated User Agreement goes into effect on January 20, 2026; for users who agreed to a prior version the new agreement is effective as of February 20, 2026.
