Amazon · Answers
Amzn-User
A customer's live question is the trigger: Amazon describes fetching "live information from the web to provide accurate answers on the user's behalf," typically an Alexa query that requires up-to-date information. Because somebody is waiting on the reply, the traffic shape is single-URL, latency-sensitive and bursty (the inverse of Amazonbot's steady sweep), and like Amzn-SearchBot it does not crawl content for model training. This is the hardest of the three to verify: 1,023 entries, bare IPv4 with no CIDR, no IPv6, and a list whose `creationTime` was already around nine months old when we checked it, against elastic host addresses that drift. Amazon's page for that list is titled "Amazonbot Live Crawl IP addresses," naming the wrong token, so a maintainer spot-checking it in isolation will mis-assign the ranges.
- Operated by
- Amazon
- Purpose
- Answers
- robots.txt token
- Amzn-User
- Verification
- IP verified
Fetches a page in real time to answer a question someone just asked.
How to verify Amzn-User
Amazon publishes the IP ranges Amzn-User crawls from, and we fetch that list on a schedule. A request claiming to be Amzn-User can therefore be checked against 1,023 published ranges: one that does not match is not this crawler.
Published ranges last confirmed by us on .
User agent
Amazon publishes this user agent for Amzn-User. Match on the Amzn-User product token rather than the whole string: vendors revise the surrounding version and URL fragments without notice.
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amzn-User/0.1) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36robots.txt for Amzn-User
Partially, and this is the only token in this group whose vendor admits it. Amazon's words: "Because actions taken by Amzn-User can be initiated by a user, it may not follow all robots.txt directives." Which directives get ignored, and under what conditions, is not enumerated anywhere, so the behaviour cannot be predicted from the documentation. Treat a `Disallow` here as a request rather than a guarantee, and verify it against your own logs before assuming it took effect. The rest of Amazon's RFC 9309 policy (host-level fetches, 30-day cache, no `crawl-delay`) otherwise applies.
Block
User-agent: Amzn-User
Disallow: /Allow
User-agent: Amzn-User
Allow: /robots.txt is a request, not an enforcement mechanism. It is honoured by convention, and a crawler that ignores it is stopped at your edge, not in a text file.
What blocking Amzn-User costs you
What breaks is an answer in flight, for someone who has already asked about something on your site. Alexa falls back to whatever stale or third-party information it holds instead of your current page, so the failure mode is a customer being told something outdated about you rather than merely not hearing about you. These answers are voice-first and Amazon documents no citation or link-back surface here, so there is no click to recover: nothing in the docs supports treating this token as a referral source in either direction. And because it may not follow all robots.txt directives, a disallow may not take effect at all.