Amzn-SearchBot
Search experiences across Amazon products and services
What Amzn-SearchBot does
Amzn-SearchBot is the retrieval half of Amazon's crawling. Amazon describes it as used to improve search experiences across its products and services, which is the token that decides whether Amazon's surfaces can find and show your pages.
Amazon publishes three tokens rather than one, and the split is the same one OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Mistral make: something that retrieves, something that improves the models, and something that fetches on behalf of a person. Five vendors now agree on that shape, which is the strongest sign yet that treating AI crawlers as one category is a mistake.
Amazon publishes the addresses this crawler operates from on its own page rather than as a JSON file, so verification is a manual lookup rather than a script.
Amzn-SearchBot is not Amazonbot
Amzn-SearchBot serves Amazon's search experiences. Amazonbot is the broader improve-our-products crawler. Amazon documents them as different jobs with different opt-outs.
What Amazonbot does insteadHow to block Amzn-SearchBot
Add this to the robots.txt at the root of your domain, alongside what is already there rather than replacing it.
robots.txt
User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot
Disallow: /What that costs you: Amazon's search surfaces cannot surface you.
To allow it instead, write nothing. A crawler with no group of its own follows your User-agent: * rules, and giving it a named group with Allow: / detaches it from those rules entirely — including any path you disallow there.
Find it in your logs
Amazon names the token but does not publish a full user-agent string for it, so match on the token itself.
To find every visit it has made, and the addresses it came from:
Terminal
grep -F 'Amzn-SearchBot' /var/log/nginx/access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rnCheck that it is really Amzn-SearchBot
A user agent is a string the visitor chooses, so on its own it proves nothing — anyone can send yours. Amazon publishes the addresses Amzn-SearchBot fetches from: a list maintained at the page Amazon maintains. Take an address out of your logs and check it against that list.
False means something else is wearing the name, and it is under no obligation to respect anything in your robots.txt. That is the traffic worth blocking at the edge, rather than the crawler that was asking politely.
Should you block Amzn-SearchBot?
Treat it the way you would treat any retrieval crawler: blocking it removes you from the surface and buys nothing on the training question, which Amazonbot governs separately.
The volume through Amazon's answer surfaces is smaller than Google's or ChatGPT's, so this is a lower-stakes decision than most on this list — but it is the same decision.
Questions
- Is Amzn-SearchBot the same as Amazonbot?
- No. Amazon documents them separately: Amzn-SearchBot is for search experiences, Amazonbot is for improving Amazon's products and services generally. Blocking one does not block the other.
The user agent and IP figures on this page were read from Amazon’s own URLs on 14 September 2026. Blocking figures come from our survey of 170 well-known sites across 10 categories on 14 September 2026, 148 of which returned a readable robots.txt.
Is Amzn-SearchBot allowed on your site right now?
The checker reads your live robots.txt and reports every token in this directory, with the exact directive that decided each one.