Amazonbot
Amazon · Search index crawler
What it does
Amazonbot builds the index that answers are retrieved from. Feeds Alexa and Amazon answer surfaces.
It does not execute JavaScript. Whatever your server returns in the initial HTML response is the entire page as far as Amazonbot is concerned — if your content is rendered client-side, this crawler reads an empty container.
Should you block Amazonbot?
Blocking it removes you from the index that answers are drawn from. Your pages stop being available as a source, and you will simply not be cited.
You are excluded from Amazon's answer and assistant surfaces, including Alexa responses that draw on web content. For most sites this is a smaller audience than the OpenAI and Anthropic surfaces, but for consumer product and recipe content it is not.
To allow it
User-agent: Amazonbot
Allow: /To block it
User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /Put the rule in your robots.txt at the site root. A group that names Amazonbot explicitly takes precedence over your User-agent: * group, so naming it is how you make your intent survive later edits to the wildcard rules.
Verifying a real Amazonbot request
Amazon documents reverse-DNS verification for Amazonbot: the source IP should resolve to an Amazon-controlled hostname, and the forward lookup of that hostname should return the same IP.
The mistake people make
Confusing Amazonbot with the various Amazon advertising and affiliate crawlers, which are separate user agents with separate purposes and separate robots.txt handling.
Can Amazonbot reach your site?
The free scan parses your robots.txt, evaluates every AI crawler against it, and tells you how much of a page Amazonbot would actually come away with.
Run the free scan