Vendor profile, retailer
eBay
In short
Bots and agents that buy for a user, or place orders with no human check, are banned on eBay from 20 February 2026 unless eBay agrees first. Trade press says the new terms block agents from Google, Amazon and Perplexity. Its robots.txt bars ten named AI crawlers from everything except 11 listed paths, among them help and seller pages.
At a glance
What it does for this layer
- eBay's User Agreement update, posted 20 Jan 2026 and effective for existing users on 20 Feb 2026, bars use of buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots or any end-to-end flow that places orders without human review, except with eBay's prior express permission (as quoted by Value Added Resource). valueaddedresource.net, read 5 Nov 2026, dated 20 Feb 2026. Secondary source
- The previous eBay User Agreement banned robots, spiders, scrapers and automated means in general but did not name AI agents or LLMs, according to Value Added Resource. valueaddedresource.net, read 5 Nov 2026. Secondary source
- Shopifreaks reported that eBay's new terms block agents from Google, Amazon and Perplexity while allowing bots with prior permission, naming OpenAI. shopifreaks.com, read 5 Nov 2026, dated 26 Jan 2026. Secondary source
- ebay.com's robots.txt disallows the site root to GPTBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, Bytespider, CCBot, ChatGLM-Spider, AmazonBot, meta-externalagent and Applebot-Extended, and its allow lines for those bots still cover 11 path prefixes, among them /help, /sellercenter and /giftcards. ebay.com, read 5 Nov 2026. Observed
- ebay.com's robots.txt gives OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User the same limited rules as regular crawlers rather than a full block. ebay.com, read 5 Nov 2026. Observed
Note on sources. eBay's User Agreement page served a security check to this site's fetcher on 5 Nov 2026, so the clause is cited from trade coverage that quotes it.
Standards
| Standard | Status | Evidence and source |
|---|---|---|
| ACP | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| UCP | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| AP2 | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| Visa TAP | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| Visa IC | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| Mastercard Agent Pay | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| Agent Pay for Machines | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| Amex ACE | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| x402 | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| MPP | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| Link for agents | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
| Verifiable Intent | no statement | None in the pages read, 5 Nov 2026 |
Checks on this vendor's domains
| Check | Result | Domain read | Dated | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ora agent-readiness score (cached) | 23/100 (F) | ebay.com | 22 Oct 2026 | ora.ai |
| robots.txt | HTTP 200, 9 user-agent groups | ebay.com | 4 Nov 2026 | ebay.com |
| llms.txt | HTTP 404 | ebay.com | 4 Nov 2026 | ebay.com |
| UCP profile at /.well-known/ucp.json | HTTP 404 | ebay.com | 4 Nov 2026 | ebay.com |
| Cloudflare isitagentready scan | no result (the scanner got HTTP 403 from the site) | ebay.com | 5 Nov 2026 | POST /api/scan on isitagentready.com, documented in llms-full.txt |
| UCP profile at /.well-known/ucp | HTTP 404 | ebay.com | 5 Nov 2026 | ebay.com |
| Homepage fetch at build | HTTP 403 | ebay.com | 5 Nov 2026 | ebay.com |
What it does not do
- eBay does not allow third-party buy-for-me agents to place orders without its prior express permission.
Related pages on this site
- All retailers in the vendors section
- All vendors
Sources
- ebay.com, read 5 Nov 2026
- eBay Explicitly Bans AI “Buy For Me” Agents, Updates Arbitration & Dispute Rules In User Agreement Update, read 5 Nov 2026. Secondary source
- eBay bans unapproved agentic shopping bots from its platform, set stage for more partnerships, read 5 Nov 2026. Secondary source
- ebay.com robots.txt, read 5 Nov 2026
- ebay.com /.well-known/ucp (HTTP 404, observed), read 5 Nov 2026
- Ora cached score record for ebay.com, read 4 Nov 2026
- robots.txt of ebay.com, read 4 Nov 2026
- llms.txt of ebay.com, read 4 Nov 2026
- UCP profile path on ebay.com, read 4 Nov 2026
- isitagentready scan service documentation (llms-full.txt), read 5 Nov 2026
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