Should you block Amzn-User? Amazon's live-fetch agent
Amzn-User is operated by Amazon. It fetches current web information for user actions, such as an Alexa question that needs a live answer.
Who should block Amzn-User, and who should not?
Leave it open for public pages whose current details people ask Alexa about, such as opening hours, prices, or availability; blocking it risks an answer built from stale or third-party data. Amazon says it may not follow every robots.txt rule, so enforce any hard block at the CDN with the published IP list. It does not train models, so blocking it for training reasons achieves nothing.
The verified facts
| User-agent token | Amzn-User/0.1 |
|---|---|
| Full user agent in logs | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amzn-User/0.1) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36 |
| Operator | Amazon |
| Purpose | Live retrieval and user-request fetchers |
| Honors robots.txt | Partly. The operator says that some requests may bypass robots.txt. |
| Published IP ranges | developer.amazon.com/amazonbot/live-ip-addresses/ |
What does Amazon’s documentation add?
- It fetches live information when a customer asks something that needs it, such as an Alexa question about current details.
- Because a user can start its actions, Amazon says it may not follow all robots.txt directives.
How do you block Amzn-User?
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Amzn-User
Disallow: /Once you give a crawler its own group, it stops reading your User-agent: * rules, so run the whole file through the AI crawler robots.txt tester before you deploy it.
Because this bot may bypass some robots.txt directives, the rule does not enforce every request. Enforcement requires blocking at the CDN or firewall using the verification data on this page.
How do you tell a real Amzn-User request from a fake one?
A user-agent match proves nothing, since any client can send Amzn-User/0.1. Check the IP against the published range file above, re-fetched on a schedule. A request that fails is not Amazon. The log verification guide has a script for the IP check and a worked reverse-DNS example, or paste the IP into the AI crawler IP verifier, which runs these checks against Amazon’s current data.
What does blocking Amzn-User cost you?
Amazon users may not be able to retrieve the site's current information for a live request.
What else does Amazon document?
Amazon also documents Amazonbot and Amzn-SearchBot, each with its own robots.txt token. How Amazon’s crawlers fit together.
Which crawlers in the same group should you decide on at the same time?
A robots.txt group for Amzn-User does nothing to crawlers with other tokens. In the same group, the directory also covers MistralAI-User (Mistral), ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), Claude-User (Anthropic), Perplexity-User (Perplexity) and meta-externalfetcher (Meta), each with its own token and its own documented cost of blocking.