> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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...
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
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.
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.