Does eBay allow AI agents?

Dispute this

Names 'buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots' as banned 'for any purpose' without permission.

Our testing

Report-only: we cite public reports and never test agents here

What the site's own pages say

Each line links to the page it comes from. Lines marked as crawler rules come from the site's robots.txt and tell automated crawlers what not to fetch; they are not legal terms.

• robots.txt states automated access without eBay's express permission is strictly prohibited

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• Checkout reserved for human users

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• Scraping, buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots and no-human-review order flows prohibited

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• Unauthorized automated agents in checkout may trigger legal action under the User Agreement

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• Approved enterprise integrations must use the official API and API License Agreement

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• v30.2_COM_August_2026

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• Automated access may be permitted solely for inclusion in public search engines

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• User-agent: OAI-AdsBot
  Allow: /b/*?*mkcid=32*
  Allow: /itm/*?*mkcid=32* 
  Disallow: /

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• Disallow: /sch/
  Disallow: /sch/*_sacat=
  Disallow: /sch/ajax

  Official source Source as of 2026-10-20 Crawler rule in the site's robots.txt: it tells automated crawlers what not to fetch. It is not a legal ban.

• User Agreement prohibits robots, spiders, scrapers and automated means to access Services

  Official source Source as of 2026-06-28

• User Agreement names buy-for-me agents and LLM-driven bots explicitly

  Official source Source as of 2026-06-28

• Automated access allowed only with prior express permission of eBay

  Official source Source as of 2026-06-28

• Circumventing technical measures prohibited

  Official source Source as of 2026-06-28

• Unreasonable load on infrastructure prohibited

  Official source Source as of 2026-06-28

• Sharing login credentials with third parties prohibited; authorized-agent access via Multi-User Account Access program

  Official source Source as of 2026-06-28

• eBay itself uses AI tools to provide Services; accuracy not guaranteed

  Official source Source as of 2026-06-28

• Effective date of current User Agreement

  Official source Source as of 2026-06-28

Sources

• eBay User Agreement 2026-06-28