What it does
Amazonbot is Amazon's training crawler. Content is copied into datasets used to train foundation models. Blocking costs you nothing in traffic today; allowing is a donation of your content to model weights with no citation or referral in return.
'Used to improve our products and services' incl. Alexa — general-purpose crawl, closest bucket is training. Honors robots at each host level; caches robots.txt up to 30 days.
Full UA: not captured in our July 2026 roster review — match log hits on the token Amazonbot (case-insensitive substring) and verify by IP before acting.
How to verify a hit is really Amazonbot
Verification method (July 2026): Published IP list page: https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot/ip-addresses (HTML page, not raw JSON)
User-agent strings are freely spoofed, so a UA match alone proves nothing. Confirm the source IP belongs to Amazon — published IP-range JSON where available, otherwise RDAP/rDNS on the IP. Full method: verify by IP.
Allow or block in robots.txt
Match the exact token Amazonbot in robots.txt:
# Block Amazonbot site-wide
User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /# Explicitly allow Amazonbot
User-agent: Amazonbot
Allow: /For the allow-search-block-training combined pattern (and the Allow-directive gotcha that silently kills carve-outs), see the robots.txt guide.
Vendor documentation: https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot
Frequently asked questions
What is Amazonbot?
Amazonbot is Amazon's training crawler. Content is copied into datasets used to train foundation models. Blocking costs you nothing in traffic today; allowing is a donation of your content to model weights with no citation or referral in return.
Does Amazonbot respect robots.txt?
Yes — Amazon documents robots.txt compliance for Amazonbot (vendor docs reviewed July 2026).
How do I block Amazonbot?
Add 'User-agent: Amazonbot' followed by 'Disallow: /' to your robots.txt. Use the exact token — substring variants of other tokens will not match.