Amazonbot is finally respecting robots.txt (opens in new tab)

(xeiaso.net)

147 pointsxena10d ago33 comments

33 comments

I just put Anubis in front of my self-hosted forge this morning because AmazonBot had helped itself to 750 GiB (!) of traffic to my public repos this month!

At least, it claimed to be AmazonBot…

Bender10d ago

Are they in this space? [1] One could map the ranges into a web daemon and rate limit them or just 'ip route add blackhole ${cidr}' each cidr block.

[1] - https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

nathanmills10d ago

Do you have a robots.txt?

xenaOP10d ago

> We are writing to inform you that starting Monday, June 15, 2026, crawl preferences for Amazonbot will be managed solely through the industry-standard directives.

They will in the future, but not today.

jacobn10d ago

I just complained to them the other day! They were scraping our weather website to no end, very much including the disallowed path prefixes.

Did end up just adding them to our WAF blocklist, which is weirdly ironic - hosting on their infra & using their services to block their AI scraper...

BLKNSLVR10d ago

I hope you leave it on the WAF. If they're only just deciding to respect robots.txt, which has been internet infrastructure forever, then it's probably still incredibly amateur software with 'Amazon-priorities' rather than 'responsible internet traffic' priorities.

tardedmeme10d ago

The responsible internet is dead. Every big actor on the internet is selfish now that there's money involved. And has been for 20 years.

Google only respected it because blocking Google from crawling your site used to hurt you more than it hurt Google.

BLKNSLVR10d ago

Time to switch to allow lists instead of block lists...

adrianvi10d ago

step 1: create the problem, step 2: sell the solution, step 3: profit

bstsb10d ago

> Get Outlook for Mac

this bit made me laugh. was the email drafted in Outlook? was it sent to some sort of forwarding mailbox, or did they just BCC every customer in?

jdiff10d ago

> Looking at the email headers it has a bunch of Exchange-specific headers so it's probably actually from Outlook for Mac.

My guess would be some sort of internal forwarding mailing list, yeah.

hkchad9d ago

They can't get out of SES sandbox /s

captn3m010d ago

Good place to ask, saw a new AWS User agent in logs today: Amazon-Quick-on-Behalf-of-$HEXID

I found a mention on some user agent trackers but no official documentation. Anyone knows if it’s documented? Asking because I am seeing decent traffic (30GB/week) from this.

embedding-shape10d ago

Came across this recently too, seems to be from "Amazon Quick" where crawling other's websites is basically a feature of the product: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quick/latest/userguide/web-crawl...

> Crawling behavior [...] Crawler identification: Identifies itself with user-agent string "aws-quick-on-behalf-of-<UUID>" in request headers.

Maybe people found a way of using it as a loophole for something or Amazon Quick is just picking up in usage, and your website is popular amongst whoever uses that sort of stuff.

iLoveOncall10d ago

Amazon Quick is the new name of Quicksight, which is the BI tool from AWS.

It has AI agents included so I guess this can just come from it searching the web based on user requests.

TurdF3rguson10d ago

Why does Amazonbot even exist, can someone explain? I don't understand why an ecommerce play would be crawling other websites.

input_sh10d ago

To train AI. Not even a hyperbole, that is the only concrete example they list in their explanation: https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot

> Amazonbot is used to improve our products and services. This helps us provide more accurate information to customers and may be used to train Amazon AI models.

tintor10d ago

To ensure Amazon marketplace sellers aren't offering lower prices on other ecommerce websites. Also AI.

embedding-shape10d ago

Amazonbot is specifically the user agent they use for crawling for "provide more accurate information to customers" (whatever that means, could be anything it sounds like) and also when they scrape for data used in AI training, according to https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot

reaperducer10d ago

AI. Gotta slurp the world.

rho13810d ago

If it respected the standard then a lack of a robits.txt implies do not crawl, which they openly state they ignore

TrackerFF10d ago

Is it just me, or is it extra unethical and self-serving when crawlers from say Amazon(Bot) decides to incessantly crawl AWS hosted websites? Same goes for Google and Microsoft crawlers crawling GC and Azure.

By that, I mean the types of crawls that can hog up significant usage.

arjie10d ago

Huh, I get a lot of traffic from Amazonbot (relative to humans) and try as I might, it would get stuck in a tarpit of no creation because it would sit there and keep blasting every variation of my recent pages because Mediawiki lists many links. I have them appropriately nofollow and warning the bot not to waste its time with robots.txt but it just goes and sticks itself on nonsense internal pages.

The traffic isn't a problem. I've got Cloudflare in front and the machine itself is relatively overpowered, and downtime isn't critical. But I'd just like the thing to be able to spider me properly. Someone did point out to me that maybe I wasn't receiving actual Amazonbot but some other spider: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352723

namegulf10d ago

Robots.txt is lame BTW, there is no way to enforce it. It is up to the bot to decide to crawl or not and most cases they don't care.

Cloudflare had a nice technic to address the bot problem (if you use their name servers). It'll respect and use the robots.txt while sending the remaining bots to a deep black hole.

input_sh10d ago

Yes, we know, its purpose is to guide the bots, not forcibly block them.

That said, one of the biggest websites in the world not respecting it is definitely a noteworthy story. Hopefully another one of the biggest websites in the world (formerly known as Twitter) eventually respects it as well instead of not even disclosing itself via a user agent and pretending to be Safari running on iOS.

namegulf10d ago

[delayed]

vindin10d ago

robots.txt is merely a gentleman’s courtesy at this point. Nobody is obligated to follow it.

c-hendricks10d ago

always_has_been.jpg

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

33 comments

phdelightful10d ago

I just put Anubis in front of my self-hosted forge this morning because AmazonBot had helped itself to 750 GiB (!) of traffic to my public repos this month!

At least, it claimed to be AmazonBot…

Bender10d ago

Are they in this space? [1] One could map the ranges into a web daemon and rate limit them or just 'ip route add blackhole ${cidr}' each cidr block.

[1] - https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

nathanmills10d ago

Do you have a robots.txt?

xenaOP10d ago

> We are writing to inform you that starting Monday, June 15, 2026, crawl preferences for Amazonbot will be managed solely through the industry-standard directives.

They will in the future, but not today.

jacobn10d ago

I just complained to them the other day! They were scraping our weather website to no end, very much including the disallowed path prefixes.

Did end up just adding them to our WAF blocklist, which is weirdly ironic - hosting on their infra & using their services to block their AI scraper...

BLKNSLVR10d ago

tardedmeme10d ago

The responsible internet is dead. Every big actor on the internet is selfish now that there's money involved. And has been for 20 years.

Google only respected it because blocking Google from crawling your site used to hurt you more than it hurt Google.

BLKNSLVR10d ago

Time to switch to allow lists instead of block lists...

adrianvi10d ago

step 1: create the problem, step 2: sell the solution, step 3: profit

bstsb10d ago

> Get Outlook for Mac

this bit made me laugh. was the email drafted in Outlook? was it sent to some sort of forwarding mailbox, or did they just BCC every customer in?

jdiff10d ago

> Looking at the email headers it has a bunch of Exchange-specific headers so it's probably actually from Outlook for Mac.

My guess would be some sort of internal forwarding mailing list, yeah.

hkchad9d ago

They can't get out of SES sandbox /s

captn3m010d ago

Good place to ask, saw a new AWS User agent in logs today: Amazon-Quick-on-Behalf-of-$HEXID

I found a mention on some user agent trackers but no official documentation. Anyone knows if it’s documented? Asking because I am seeing decent traffic (30GB/week) from this.

embedding-shape10d ago

Came across this recently too, seems to be from "Amazon Quick" where crawling other's websites is basically a feature of the product: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quick/latest/userguide/web-crawl...

> Crawling behavior [...] Crawler identification: Identifies itself with user-agent string "aws-quick-on-behalf-of-<UUID>" in request headers.

Maybe people found a way of using it as a loophole for something or Amazon Quick is just picking up in usage, and your website is popular amongst whoever uses that sort of stuff.

iLoveOncall10d ago

Amazon Quick is the new name of Quicksight, which is the BI tool from AWS.

It has AI agents included so I guess this can just come from it searching the web based on user requests.

TurdF3rguson10d ago

Why does Amazonbot even exist, can someone explain? I don't understand why an ecommerce play would be crawling other websites.

input_sh10d ago

To train AI. Not even a hyperbole, that is the only concrete example they list in their explanation: https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot

> Amazonbot is used to improve our products and services. This helps us provide more accurate information to customers and may be used to train Amazon AI models.

tintor10d ago

To ensure Amazon marketplace sellers aren't offering lower prices on other ecommerce websites. Also AI.

embedding-shape10d ago

reaperducer10d ago

AI. Gotta slurp the world.

rho13810d ago

If it respected the standard then a lack of a robits.txt implies do not crawl, which they openly state they ignore

TrackerFF10d ago

By that, I mean the types of crawls that can hog up significant usage.

arjie10d ago

namegulf10d ago

Robots.txt is lame BTW, there is no way to enforce it. It is up to the bot to decide to crawl or not and most cases they don't care.

Cloudflare had a nice technic to address the bot problem (if you use their name servers). It'll respect and use the robots.txt while sending the remaining bots to a deep black hole.

input_sh10d ago

Yes, we know, its purpose is to guide the bots, not forcibly block them.

namegulf10d ago

[delayed]

vindin10d ago

robots.txt is merely a gentleman’s courtesy at this point. Nobody is obligated to follow it.

c-hendricks10d ago

always_has_been.jpg

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse