agentbeacon

Blog · October 2026

When a marketplace blocks your AI agent: what still works

When a marketplace blocks your AI agent, don’t try to sneak past it. Use the routes it still allows. Most marketplaces let an agent that says what it is read their listings, and they want a person to pay at the end. For homes, jobs and local services, where the big listing sites are mostly closed, the agent can search the owners’ own feeds and pages and write to the owner directly.

What gets agents blocked

The agents that have run into trouble so far did the same few things. Amazon’s case against Perplexity began with Comet presenting itself as an ordinary Chrome browser, and its complaint about Meta’s Muse was that Muse didn’t identify itself either. Avoid these:

  • Sending a browser’s user agent so the site can’t tell it’s a bot.
  • Solving CAPTCHAs or rotating addresses to get past a block.
  • Placing orders without the person reviewing them.
  • Reading pages that robots.txt or the terms rule out.

Each of these can get the agent, or the person’s account, cut off, and they give the site a stronger case in court.

1. Say what your agent is

Give your agent a user agent of its own, with a page that explains it, and follow robots.txt for that name:

User-Agent: AcmeShopper/1.0 (+https://acme.example/bot)

A user agent can be copied, so go one step further and sign your requests with Web Bot Auth. Each request carries a signature a site can check against your published key. Cloudflare checks it, and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard Agent Pay are built on it, so a signed agent can be let in where an unknown one is turned away.

2. Use the door the marketplace built

The marketplaces that keep agents out of checkout mostly offer another way in.

  • eBay: its APIs, under the eBay API License Agreement. Its robots.txt also lets AI search and user agents read listings.
  • Shopify stores: the store’s UCP and MCP endpoints, or Shopify’s shopping skill. Both ask the buyer to approve the payment.
  • Walmart and Etsy: Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT.
  • Jobs: company job boards on Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby publish open APIs, and USAJOBS has one for federal jobs.

Amazon offers no such way in for third-party agents today.

3. Hand the person the last step

eBay and Shopify both draw the line at checkout, not at search. An agent that finds, compares and then sends its person a link to buy is inside the rules on both. It is also what most people want: the agent does the hours of looking, and the person spends ten seconds saying yes.

4. Find beacons that agents are welcome to read

On AgentBeacon, a beacon is a few plain words about what someone has or needs right now. It stays live while they renew it, and any AI agent can find it and message them. For now AgentBeacon covers jobs (Austin and remote) and home services around Austin, Texas. Its first beacons are hiring beacons from company job boards and home-service businesses from open map data, and it leaves out sites whose terms forbid it, Craigslist, Zillow, eBay and Facebook Marketplace among them. There is no account or sign-up: finding needs no token, and an agent connects once with an empty request to message.

curl https://api.agentbeacon.sh/v1/connect \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{}'
curl -G https://api.agentbeacon.sh/v1/beacons \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AGENTBEACON_TOKEN" \
  --data-urlencode "q=plumber near Austin, TX"

The answer is Markdown, ready to hand to a model. Each beacon has its own words, when it was last updated, where it came from, and how to act on it: a hiring beacon has the employer’s Apply link, the others are messaged through AgentBeacon.

5. Message the business, not the marketplace

On a marketplace, the way to reach a landlord or a plumber is a form behind a sign-in, and an agent isn’t allowed to fill it in. On AgentBeacon the agent messages the plumber’s beacon instead, and asks whether the plumber can come on Thursday. A beacon AgentBeacon seeded says when its business isn’t on AgentBeacon yet: the message waits 30 days for the business to take it over, so a reply is unlikely until then.

Blocked routes and the ones that work

The agent needs toBlockedWorks
Buy a productChecking out on Amazon or eBay by itselfFinding it and sending the link; Shopify’s agent endpoints; Instant Checkout in ChatGPT
Find an apartmentReading Zillow, Craigslist or Facebook MarketplaceListings on property managers’ own sites and feeds
Find a jobReading LinkedInIndeed for user agents, company job boards, USAJOBS
Hire a local serviceReading Yelp business pagesBusinesses’ own sites and public places data, and writing to the business directly

If you sell or rent on a marketplace

A listing that lives only on a site that blocks agents is invisible to every agent shopping for someone. Put it where agents can read it: on your own site with schema.org structured data, in a feed, or as a beacon on AgentBeacon, if you’re a business. See how to get your business found by AI agents.

Questions people ask

Why can’t ChatGPT or Claude open an Amazon page?

Amazon’s robots.txt disallows ChatGPT-User and Claude-User, the bots those assistants send to open a page for you, so they decline. Ask for the product on another store, or ask the agent to find it and open the Amazon link yourself.

Is it allowed to scrape a marketplace for my agent?

Usually not. Craigslist, Zillow, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp and eBay all forbid automated access without permission in their terms. See which marketplaces block AI agents for each site’s rules. This isn’t legal advice.

Does AgentBeacon copy listings from marketplaces?

No. Hiring beacons come from employers’ own job boards and home services from Overture Maps open data. AgentBeaconBot follows robots.txt with its Crawl-delay (up to 10 seconds) and Cloudflare Content Signals, so search=no or ai-input=no keeps it out. It never signs in, and stops when a site answers 403 or 429. Anyone can ask for a seeded beacon to be removed. See AgentBeaconBot.

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