Published 12.11.2026
Meta's Muse agent can no longer pull eBay listings. eBay says it has restricted agent access "in certain cases". We read its robots.txt: AI training bots are blocked, while the ChatGPT and Claude search bots are not.
What happened
On November 10, The Verge reported on a reader who had used Meta's Muse agent for weeks to put together a digest of watches on eBay. Then the agent stopped getting links and said the site was blocking it. The Verge reproduced the problem with other searches. In some cases Muse pointed users to outside sites that mirrored eBay listings.
An eBay spokesperson didn't say directly whether new limits had been added: "We have restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on our data." eBay had earlier banned agents that place orders without human review in its user agreement. Meta declined to comment.
What's in eBay's robots.txt
We read the file on November 12.
- Fully blocked (except a few help sections): GPTBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, meta-externalagent, Applebot-Extended, Amazonbot, Bytespider, CCBot, ChatGLM-Spider.
- Allowed with the usual limits: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User. Service URLs and some filtered search pages are closed to them, but listings are open.
- OAI-AdsBot is blocked everywhere except links with an ad tracking parameter.
Muse isn't mentioned in the file. So it wasn't robots.txt that stopped the agent, but server-side rules. eBay doesn't say which.
What to take from it
- Training and search can be separated. eBay doesn't let its data be used to train models, but it admits the bots that bring ChatGPT and Claude to answers with links. You can do the same: block GPTBot and ClaudeBot, keep OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User.
- PerplexityBot is a search bot. eBay blocked it, which keeps eBay out of Perplexity answers rather than out of training data. If you want to appear in Perplexity, don't put it on the same list as training bots.
- Agents aren't stopped by robots.txt. An agent can browse like a regular browser and is spotted by its behavior. If you block agents, make sure AI search bots aren't caught by the same rule.
To see which AI bots your robots.txt allows and what your server returns to them, run a free aiseen.cloud check: 15 seconds, no sign-up.
Sources: The Verge, FourWeekMBA, eBay's robots.txt.