amazonbot.amazon

What It Is

AmazonBot is Amazon’s crawler documentation page for webmasters and content owners. It lists three types of crawlers — Amazonbot, Amzn-SearchBot, and Amzn-User — and explains how they access website content, as well as how site owners can manage them using industry-standard directives. Strictly speaking, it is not a purchasable software tool, but rather a transparency and control entry point for Amazon’s crawler ecosystem.

Core Capabilities and Use Cases

Amazonbot is used to improve Amazon products and services, and may also be used to train Amazon AI models. Amzn-SearchBot is used to improve search experiences within Amazon products and services; once access is allowed, content may appear in experiences such as Alexa and Rufus, and Amazon states that it is not used for training generative AI models. Amzn-User supports retrieving real-time web information on behalf of users, such as answering Alexa questions that require up-to-date information, and is also not used for generative AI model training. The page publishes the relevant User-Agent strings and IP address links, making it easier for operations, security, and SEO teams to identify traffic sources.

Control Mechanisms, Ecosystem, and Documentation

Amazon states that it follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol, supports user-agent and allow/disallow directives, and reads host-level robots.txt files. In multi-host scenarios, rules are handled independently for each host. The page also notes support for rel=nofollow and page-level robots meta tags such as noarchive, noindex, and none, but it does not support crawl-delay. The documentation is straightforward and covers the identification, purpose, and blocking methods that webmasters care about most. However, the current page is English-only, with Chinese still under development, and it lacks robots.txt examples, an online verification tool, and more granular policy guidance.

Pricing and Openness

The page does not mention any pricing model, nor does it provide an API/SDK or self-hosting option. AmazonBot is Amazon’s proprietary crawler system, not an open-source project. What site owners can do is control its access through standard protocols or contact support at [email protected].

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

The strengths are clear crawler categorization, explicit separation between search, real-time user requests, and potential AI training use cases, plus public IP and User-Agent information. The drawbacks are that crawl-delay is not supported, robots.txt fetch failures are treated as if the file does not exist, and Chinese documentation is missing. It is suitable for website owners, publishers, content compliance teams, SEO teams, and security/operations staff who need to decide whether to allow Amazon-related products to crawl and use their content.

Access from China and Alternatives

The crawled text does not provide information on access from mainland China, payment, or network availability, so its China accessibility status is unknown. For crawler governance, teams can also refer to the public documentation and robots control policies for similar crawlers such as Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, GPTBot, and ClaudeBot.