Amazonbot
Amazonbot is a bot operated by Amazon that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Includes references to crawled website when surfacing answers via Alexa; does not clearly outline other uses. It honours robots.txt, and a request claiming to be Amazonbot can be checked against a forward-confirmed reverse DNS lookup.
Amazonbot at a glance
| User agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) |
|---|---|
| Operator | Amazon |
| Purpose | Service improvement and enabling answers for Alexa users. |
| Respects robots.txt | Yes, documented |
| Verification method | Reverse DNS, forward confirmed Verify with a reverse lookup: the PTR record resolves under the Amazon crawler domain, and a forward lookup of that hostname must return the original IP. https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | Amazonbot |
| Operator documentation | https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot |
Includes references to crawled website when surfacing answers via Alexa; does not clearly outline other uses.
Allow or block Amazonbot
Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.
User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: Amazonbot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: Amazonbot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
Blocking Amazonbot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really Amazonbot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Amazonbot precisely because site owners allow it. Verify with a reverse lookup: the PTR record resolves under the Amazon crawler domain, and a forward lookup of that hostname must return the original IP.
Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.
Other crawlers run by Amazon
Related crawlers
Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand
Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.