What is Amazonbot?
Amazonbot is Amazon's web crawler, originally built to improve Alexa's spoken answers and now also feeding Rufus, Amazon's AI shopping assistant, which makes it one of the few major AI crawlers whose output shows up inside a checkout flow rather than a chat window.
Amazonbot started as the crawler behind Alexa's spoken answers, fetching web pages so Alexa could summarize them out loud. It has since expanded to also support Rufus, Amazon's shopping assistant built into the Amazon app, which means the same crawler now feeds both a voice assistant and a product-recommendation surface.
For most sites the practical question isn't whether to allow Amazonbot, it's whether the content it's fetching is the kind Amazon's assistants would ever cite. A recipe site or a product comparison page is exactly the kind of content Rufus and Alexa draw from; a login-gated dashboard is not, and blocking Amazonbot there costs nothing because it was never going to be quoted.
Related
- GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler. It reads pages to train and ground OpenAI's models, including ChatGPT.
- AI crawlerAn AI crawler is a bot operated by an AI company to fetch web pages for training, indexing, or answering a live question.
- User agentA user agent is the name a client sends to identify itself when requesting a page. robots.txt rules are written against these names, which is why blocking AI crawlers means naming each one.
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