Amazonbot

Amazonbot is the dedicated web crawler developed and operated by Amazon. Its main function is to systematically browse the internet to collect information that enhances various Amazon services, particularly the question-answering capabilities of Alexa. The bot identifies itself with a clear user-agent string, such as Mozilla/5.0 (...); Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot. Amazon provides a verification system for its crawler; administrators can confirm its legitimacy through DNS lookups, which should resolve to a crawl.amazonbot.amazon subdomain.

Amazonbot is visiting your website to gather publicly available information that can improve how Amazon's services, especially Alexa, respond to user queries. It looks for factual information, product details, and other high-quality content that could be valuable for answering questions. The frequency of its visits depends on the relevance and update schedule of your content. This crawling is considered authorized, as the bot respects standard web protocols like robots.txt, but it will access public content unless specifically instructed not to.

The core purpose of Amazonbot is to improve Amazon's services, primarily by enhancing Alexa's knowledge base. The web content it collects and indexes allows Alexa to provide more accurate and natural-sounding answers when users ask questions via Alexa-enabled devices. For website owners, having your content crawled by Amazonbot can increase your information's visibility within the Amazon ecosystem. If Alexa references your content when answering a question, it can potentially drive awareness of your brand or expertise.

To prevent Amazonbot from accessing your website, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This is the standard method for managing crawler access to your site.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file to block Amazonbot:

User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /