Amzn-SearchBot
Amzn-SearchBot is Amazon's search crawler. It reads pages so they can appear in search in Amazon products like Alexa, and isn't used for AI training.
Amzn-SearchBot is the crawler Amazon uses for search in its own products, such as Alexa. When it reads your pages, they can be shown in those search results and answers. Amazon says it doesn't collect content to train generative AI models. Its page for site owners covers it next to Amazonbot and Amzn-User.
If you want to show up when people ask Amazon's assistants a question, this is the bot that needs to reach your pages.
How it fits with Amazon's other bots
Amazon runs three bots, each with its own name and its own job:
- Amazonbot crawls to improve Amazon's products, and its data may be used for AI training
- Amzn-SearchBot crawls for search in Amazon's products, with no AI training
- Amzn-User fetches a page when a person's question needs fresh information
Because each one has its own name in robots.txt, you can treat them differently.
Setting your rules
For example, Fernhill Coffee wants to appear in Alexa's answers but doesn't want its pages used to train Amazon's models. Its robots.txt could say:
User-agent: Amazonbot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot
Allow: /Amazon says that if your robots.txt doesn't name Amzn-SearchBot, it follows the rules you've set for other search bots. So it's worth naming it, so its access doesn't depend on rules you wrote for someone else's bot.
Amazon publishes the addresses Amzn-SearchBot crawls from, so you can check that a visit using the name is really Amazon's. Changes to your rules can take about a day to reach Amazon.