What is Amzn-SearchBot?
It crawls to improve search experiences in Amazon products such as Alexa. Amazon says it does not crawl content for generative AI training.
Indexes pages so an AI search product can cite and link them in answers. Blocking it usually means you stop showing up as a source there.
If robots.txt does not mention Amzn-SearchBot but allows other search bots, Amazon says it follows the rules given to those bots.
Amzn-SearchBot user agent
Amazon documents this user agent for Amzn-SearchBot. Version numbers in it change over time, so match on the name, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amzn-SearchBot/0.1) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36Should you block Amzn-SearchBot?
Usually allow it. It is how an AI search product finds pages to cite and link, so blocking it trades away being a source in those answers.
How to block Amzn-SearchBot in robots.txt
Add a group for its token to robots.txt at the root of your site.
A bot follows only the group that names it, so it ignores your User-agent: * rules once it has a group of its own. Repeat any paths you also want kept from it there.
Amazon says its crawlers honor the noarchive (do not use for model training), noindex and none robots meta tags and rel=nofollow, but not Crawl-delay.
User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot
Disallow: /How to verify a request is really Amzn-SearchBot
Anyone can send any user agent, so the string alone proves nothing.
Amazon publishes the IP ranges Amzn-SearchBot crawls from. A request that claims to be Amzn-SearchBot from any other address is not Amzn-SearchBot.
See when Amzn-SearchBot reads your site
Bots don’t run JavaScript analytics, so a script tag never sees them. invisit records crawler reads on the server instead, through its server SDK or a Cloudflare Worker, and shows which bots read which pages, next to your visitors.
Checked against Amazon’s own documentation on . Something changed? Write to help@invisit.dev.