eBay Blocks AI Shopping Agents as Uber Reports Four Agent Rides

Uber completed 320 million rides and deliveries in the last week of October. AI agents accounted for roughly 500 Uber Eats orders and four rides in that period. That ratio, disclosed by CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy on the company's Nov. 4 earnings call, frames the week's other news: eBay appears to have shut third-party AI shopping agents out of its marketplace entirely.

The Verge reported on Tuesday that Meta's Muse agent can no longer pull links or details from eBay. A reader told the outlet he had used Muse for several weeks to compile a daily digest of watches for sale on eBay, complete with links, prices, shipping details and condition notes. This weekend the agent returned nothing and said it was blocked. The Verge reproduced the failure with other searches and found that Muse sometimes redirected users to outside sites mirroring eBay listings.

What do eBay's rules actually say?

eBay spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand declined to say directly whether the company had imposed new limits. "We take a selective approach to how they access and interact with our marketplace," she said of third parties. "We have restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on our data." She added that eBay has "ongoing discussions with potential partners" and is evaluating how third-party agents could help new customers discover its inventory.

The written rules predate the block. eBay's user agreement, in terms effective Feb. 20, 2026, bars users from deploying "buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review" without prior express permission. The earlier version banned robots and scrapers in general but never mentioned AI agents or LLMs. Until recently, agents like Muse could still browse listings without interference.

The company's robots.txt file, checked by MLQ.ai on Tuesday, opens with a "Robots & Agent Policy" stating that "Checkouts are strictly for human users" and that unauthorized automated checkout "may result in legal action." Approved enterprise integrations must use eBay's official API. The file disallows the whole site for several AI crawlers, including Meta's meta-externalagent, OpenAI's GPTBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and AmazonBot. OpenAI's ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot, along with Anthropic's Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot, remain allowed on most of the site. Robots.txt is a voluntary convention, so the file alone does not explain how eBay stopped Muse.

How split are retailers on agents?

The policy landscape is scattered. Amazon blocks external agents from browsing or shopping entirely, according to The Verge. Target lets agents browse in some cases and blocks them in others. Shopify has opened its catalog of a billion listings so shoppers can have agents buy on their behalf. The infrastructure mismatch cuts both ways: in October, The Verge found Muse could hold listings hostage on The RealReal, a secondhand consignment site, by repeatedly adding an item to a cart. The RealReal updated its bot system after that report.

How little traffic are agents generating?

Uber's numbers are the starkest. "It is very, very early, and very limited traction that we have seen so far," Krishnamurthy said. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi noted that ordering an Uber takes a median of 50 seconds and Uber Eats 90 seconds, leaving little for an agent to save. "Every single AI system company is talking to us, and we're really now negotiating the terms of trade," he said. Uber's own Cart Assistance tool, which builds a grocery basket from a photo of a handwritten list or a recipe screenshot, produces baskets roughly twice the average size.

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu said on the Oct. 29 call that agents had generated "maybe several hundred orders in total across the time that they have been up and running." DoorDash reported 993 million orders last quarter. The company is pushing its own tools instead, including Ask DoorDash for grocery lists and a text-to-order feature.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, on the Nov. 5 call, said a "very non-material number" of the company's nearly half a million daily bookings come through agents. Agents "are good at simple routine tasks," he said, but "discovering where to go and where to stay is part of the experience." Airbnb is building its own trip-planning agent, with a rollout planned for early next year.

The pattern across all four companies is consistent: platforms want agents on their own terms, through their own APIs and their own tools. Until the volume justifies partnership economics, the gates stay closed.