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Amazon doubles AI bot blocking to 100, adding DeepSeek and xAI/Grok
Juozas Kaziukėnas has flagged that Amazon has doubled the number of AI bots it is blocking, adding China's DeepSeek and Musk's xAI/Grok. Amazon now blocks 100 different bots, playing whack-a-mole as new ones emerge.
What changed
Amazon began fighting AI scrapers in July 2025; as of today, all major AI companies are on the blacklist: including Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which Amazon has invested in.
The structural read: the blocking covers both training crawls and on-demand web search. Scrapers can ignore the blacklist (and some do), but most well-behaved AI systems respect robots.txt. Amazon's server-side anti-bot tech (captchas, behavioural fingerprinting) is materially more effective than the blacklist alone. AI companies still access Amazon data indirectly: typically through Google search snippets: so the blacklist is partially symbolic.
Why it matters for advertisers
For you, this means brands relying on AI-search visibility for Amazon listings need to think structurally about how AI surfaces are sourcing Amazon product data. Particularly relevant for SEO and brand-visibility strategies that have been treating AI citations as a unified channel, the Amazon data-access pattern is materially different from open-web sources.
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Original newsletter text and archive evidence
Amazon doubles AI bot blocking to 100, adding DeepSeek and xAI/Grok
Juozas Kaziukėnas has flagged that Amazon has doubled the number of AI bots it is blocking, adding China's DeepSeek and Musk's xAI/Grok. Amazon now blocks 100 different bots, playing whack-a-mole as new ones emerge. Amazon began fighting AI scrapers in July 2025; as of today, all major AI companies are on the blacklist: including Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which Amazon has invested in.
The structural read: the blocking covers both training crawls and on-demand web search. Scrapers can ignore the blacklist (and some do), but most well-behaved AI systems respect robots.txt. Amazon's server-side anti-bot tech (captchas, behavioural fingerprinting) is materially more effective than the blacklist alone. AI companies still access Amazon data indirectly: typically through Google search snippets: so the blacklist is partially symbolic.
For you, this means brands relying on AI-search visibility for Amazon listings need to think structurally about how AI surfaces are sourcing Amazon product data. Particularly relevant for SEO and brand-visibility strategies that have been treating AI citations as a unified channel, the Amazon data-access pattern is materially different from open-web sources.
Source captured . No explicit first-contributor label was provided for this update.
