Amazonbot

What is Amazonbot?

Amazonbot is a web crawler developed and operated by Amazon to enhance their services, particularly Alexa's question-answering capabilities. As a dedicated web crawler, it systematically browses the internet to collect information that improves Amazon's ability to provide accurate responses to user queries. You can find comprehensive information about Amazonbot on Amazon's developer documentation.

When Amazonbot visits your site, it identifies itself with a distinctive user-agent string that includes Amazonbot along with additional agent information. A typical example looks like: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML\, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot).

One notable characteristic of Amazonbot is its verification system. Website administrators can verify that a crawler is legitimately Amazonbot by performing DNS lookups on the accessing IP address, which should resolve to a subdomain of crawl.amazonbot.amazon and match the original IP when forward-resolved.

Why is Amazonbot crawling my site?

Amazonbot crawls websites to gather information that enhances Amazon's services, particularly to improve how Alexa answers questions for users. It typically looks for publicly available content that could be valuable for responding to user queries, including factual information, product details, and other content that might be relevant to voice assistant responses.

The frequency of Amazonbot visits depends on your site's content and relevance to Amazon's services. Sites with frequently updated, high-quality content that's useful for answering common questions may see more regular visits.

Amazonbot's crawling is generally considered authorized as it respects standard web protocols like robots.txt, but it will attempt to crawl your site unless specifically instructed not to. If you're seeing Amazonbot in your logs, it's because your content is potentially valuable for Amazon's services, and the crawler is following standard web protocols to access publicly available information.

What is the purpose of Amazonbot?

Amazonbot serves primarily to improve Amazon's services, with a particular focus on enhancing Alexa's ability to provide accurate answers to user questions. The bot collects and indexes web content that can be used to respond to voice queries and other information requests across Amazon's ecosystem.

The data collected by Amazonbot helps Amazon build more comprehensive knowledge bases that power their virtual assistant technologies. This enables more natural and accurate responses when users ask questions through Alexa-enabled devices.

For website owners, having your content crawled by Amazonbot may increase your information's visibility within Amazon's ecosystem. If your content is referenced by Alexa when answering questions, this could potentially drive awareness of your brand or expertise.

How do I block Amazonbot?

Amazonbot respects the robots.txt protocol, making it relatively straightforward to control its access to your site. If you want to block Amazonbot from crawling specific sections of your website, you can add directives to your robots.txt file. For example:

User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /do-not-crawl/

This will prevent Amazonbot from accessing the /do-not-crawl/ directory. You can also block Amazonbot from your entire site by using:

User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /

It's worth noting that Amazonbot looks for robots.txt at the host level (e.g., test.amazon.com) but not at the domain level (e.g., amazon.com). If Amazonbot can't access your robots.txt file due to technical issues, it will attempt to refetch it or use a cached copy from the last 30 days. If both approaches fail, it will proceed with crawling as if the file doesn't exist.

For link-level control, Amazonbot supports the rel=nofollow directive. Additionally, if you don't want your content used for training large language models, you can include a meta tag in your HTML: <meta name="amazonbot" content="noarchive"> or use the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. Blocking Amazonbot may reduce your content's visibility in Amazon's services, but won't affect your traditional search engine rankings.