Amazon AdBot FAQs

1. What is Amazon AdBot?
Amazon Ads uses AmazonAdBot to maintain a brand-safe environment for advertisers and deliver more relevant ads to users. It scans web pages that request ads from Amazon's advertising systems, collecting page content to send through Amazon's classification systems. This allows Amazon to detect potentially inappropriate content and use contextual signals from page content to improve ad fill rates and relevance for publishers.

The bot is designed to be respectful of publisher resources - it honors robots.txt directives, limits its scan speed and clearly identifies itself through its User-Agent string and reverse DNS that resolves to amazonadbot.com subdomains.

2. What is the User-Agent for Amazon AdBot?
Amazon AdBot identifies itself with the user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AmazonAdBot/1.0; +https://adbot.amazon.com)

3. Is there a mechanism by which I can control how Amazon AdBot crawls my website?
Yes, publishers can control AmazonAdBot's access through standard web mechanisms. AmazonAdBot honors all standard robots.txt directives, including Disallow and Allow rules set for the AmazonAdBot user agent. Publishers can also use Crawl-Delay directives to control scan frequency, though removing these directives allows for optimal ad performance.

Additionally, if your website uses bot-blocking mechanisms through Cloudflare, Akamai, AWS WAF, Captcha systems, or others, you can configure these tools to explicitly allow or block AmazonAdBot. The bot identifies itself through its User-Agent string and originates from IP addresses whose reverse DNS resolves to amazonadbot.com subdomains.

It's important to understand that blocking AmazonAdBot access will impact your access to Amazon Ads demand.

4. Is there a mechanism to verify if the Amazon Ad Bot crawl request is genuine?
If you see what appears to be Amazon AdBot traffic in your server logs based on a user agent string such as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AmazonAdBot/1.0; +https://adbot.amazon.com) and you want to verify if this traffic is genuine, you may:

  1. Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address accessing your website (as found in your logs), using the ‘host’ command.
  2. Verify that the result is a sub-domain of domain name amazonadbot.com.
  3. Run a forward DNS lookup on the fully qualified domain name retrieved in step 1 using the ‘host’ command. Verify that it's the same as the original accessing IP address from your logs.
Example DNS Lookup:

Reverse DNS Lookup
example.com ~ $ host 52.70.xx.52
52.xx.70.52.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer crawler-52-70-xx-52.amazonadbot.com.
Forward DNS Lookup:
example.com ~ $ host crawler-52-70-xx-52.amazonadbot.com
crawler-52-70-xx-52.amazonadbot.com has address 52.70.xx.52
The ‘host’ tool is a dns lookup utility that is available on Linux systems, Unix systems and Mac OS. On Windows systems, ‘host’ tool is not available. Alternatively, ’nslookup’ utility can be run from your MS-DOS command line, or from the powershell of latest Windows versions.

Amazon does not post a public list of IP addresses for website owners to add to allow-lists since IP address ranges can change.

5. I have additional questions about Amazon AdBot. Who should I contact?
If you have additional questions about Amazon AdBot, you may contact adbothelp@amazon.com.