What Amzn-SearchBot does
Amzn-SearchBot crawls the web to improve search in Amazon products; content it indexes is eligible to appear in search experiences such as Alexa. Amazon states it does not crawl content for generative AI model training, which keeps it a separate decision from Amazonbot.
Should I allow Amzn-SearchBot to crawl my site?
Blocking Amzn-SearchBot removes your content from the index behind Amazon's search experiences, including Alexa. Because it doesn't feed AI training, allowing it is purely a search-visibility decision, independent of how you treat Amazonbot.
How to control Amzn-SearchBot
Target Amzn-SearchBot in your robots.txt with the Amzn-SearchBot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Amzn-SearchBot
User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot
Allow: /Block Amzn-SearchBot
User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot
Disallow: /If your robots.txt doesn't mention Amzn-SearchBot but allows other search bots, it crawls in accordance with the directives you give those bots. Genuine requests can be verified against the IP addresses published at developer.amazon.com/amazonbot/searchbot-ip-addresses/.
User-agent string
As published by Amazon. Remember that user-agent strings can be spoofed, so verify suspicious traffic against the operator's published IP ranges.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amzn-SearchBot/0.1) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36Amzn-SearchBot FAQ
What is Amzn-SearchBot?
Amzn-SearchBot is Amazon's search crawler. It indexes web content to improve search in Amazon products, making pages eligible to appear in search experiences such as Alexa. Amazon states it does not crawl content for generative AI model training.
How do I block Amzn-SearchBot?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot" and "Disallow: /". Note the fallback rule: if your robots.txt doesn't mention Amzn-SearchBot but allows other search bots, it follows the directives you give those bots. Amazon says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to propagate.
About AI Search Crawlers
Crawlers that build the retrieval indexes behind AI search products like ChatGPT search and Perplexity. They decide which pages can be cited as sources.
Blocking these keeps your content out of the source index: AI search products can't cite pages they can't crawl.
