In short. Amzn-SearchBot makes content eligible for Amazon search experiences and follows other search bots' robots.txt directives when its own name is absent and those bots are allowed.

Definition: Amzn-SearchBot is Amazon's web crawler for search experiences such as Alexa. As of 17 October 2026, Amazon documents that allowing it access makes website content eligible to appear in those experiences.

Key facts

Amazon's About AmazonBot documentation treats Amzn-SearchBot, Amazonbot and Amzn-User as agents with independent settings.
The IETF's Robots Exclusion Protocol defines robots.txt, a file containing crawler access rules grouped by user-agent name.
Amazon publishes a dedicated Searchbot IP address list, containing address prefixes for this crawler.

What happens when Amzn-SearchBot has no named rule?

Amazon's crawler documentation states that if robots.txt omits Amzn-SearchBot but allows other search bots, Amzn-SearchBot follows the directives given to those bots. Amazon does not identify the other bots or explain how conflicting directives affect this fallback.

The standard matching procedure in RFC 9309 uses the crawler's product token, its identifying name, to select a group. Matching ignores letter case. Multiple groups matching that token are combined. When no matching group exists, the standard selects the User-agent: * group if present. Amazon documents its additional search-bot fallback separately.

How can a site state an explicit rule?

An explicit group names Amzn-SearchBot directly. The following illustrative robots.txt group disallows every path for that token, using the syntax defined in RFC 9309:

User-agent: Amzn-SearchBot
Disallow: /

Replacing Disallow: / with Allow: / expresses permission for every path in that group. These are configuration examples, not records of a particular website's policy.

The same standard requires the file at the service's top-level /robots.txt path, encoded as UTF-8 and served as text/plain. Within a matching group, path rules use the most specific match, measured by length in octets, or bytes. For equivalent allow and disallow rules, the standard recommends the allow rule. If no path rule matches, access is allowed.

What affects search indexing after a rule change?

Amazon's robots guidance says setting changes may take about 24 hours to appear in its systems. It also documents support for noindex, a page-level robots meta tag that instructs the crawler to exclude the page from indexing. The agents do not support crawl-delay.

FAQ

Does blocking Amazonbot also block Amzn-SearchBot?

Amazon's documentation describes each agent's setting as independent. Set the Amzn-SearchBot policy explicitly when controlling its access.

Can robots.txt protect confidential pages?

RFC 9309 describes these rules as separate from access authorization. It says content requiring protection should use an application-layer security measure, such as HTTP authentication. A disallow rule also makes the listed path publicly visible in robots.txt.

Sources

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