{"id":12847,"date":"2025-08-25T20:12:42","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T20:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/amazon-quietly-blocks-ai-bots-from-meta-google-huawei-and-more\/"},"modified":"2025-08-25T20:12:42","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T20:12:42","slug":"amazon-quietly-blocks-ai-bots-from-meta-google-huawei-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/amazon-quietly-blocks-ai-bots-from-meta-google-huawei-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon quietly blocks AI bots from Meta, Google, Huawei and more"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Allison Smith<\/span> \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 August 25, 2025<\/span> \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Amazon<\/p>\n

\n Ivy Liu <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n

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This story was first published by Digiday sibling, Modern Retail<\/em><\/p>\n

Amazon is escalating efforts to keep artificial intelligence companies from scraping its e-commerce data, as the retail giant recently added six more AI-related crawlers to its publicly available robots.txt file.<\/p>\n

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The change was first spotted by Juozas Kaziuk\u0117nas, an independent analyst, who noted that the updated code underlying\u00a0<\/strong>Amazon\u2019s sprawling website now includes language that prohibits bots from Meta, Google, Huawei, Mistral and others.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmazon is desperately trying to stop AI companies from training models on its data,\u201d Kaziuk\u0117nas wrote in a\u00a0LinkedIn post\u00a0on Thursday. \u201cI think it is too late to stop AI training \u2014 Amazon\u2019s data is already in the datasets ChatGPT and others are using. But Amazon is definitely not interested in helping anyone build the future of AI shopping. If that is indeed the future, Amazon wants to build it itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The update builds on earlier restrictions Amazon added at least a month ago targeting crawlers from Anthropic\u2019s Claude, Perplexity and Google\u2019s Project Mariner agents,\u00a0The Information\u00a0reported. Robots.txt files are a standard tool that websites use to give instructions to automated crawlers like search engines. While restrictions outlined in robots.txt files are\u00a0advisory rather than enforceable, they act as signposts for automated systems \u2014 that is, if the crawlers are \u201cwell-behaved,\u201d they are expected to respect the block, according to Kaziuk\u0117nas.<\/p>\n

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment by press time.<\/p>\n

The move highlights Amazon\u2019s increasingly aggressive stance toward third-party AI tools that could scrape its product pages, monitor prices or even attempt automated purchases. For Amazon, the stakes are significant. Its online marketplace is not only the largest store of e-commerce data in the world but also the foundation of a\u00a0$56 billion advertising business\u00a0built around shoppers browsing its site. Allowing outside AI tools to surface products directly to users could bypass Amazon\u2019s storefront, undermining both traffic and ad revenue.<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s changes come shortly after Shopify, the e-commerce technology provider, introduced a warning to the robots.txt file of its merchants\u2019 sites, including Brooklinen, Alo Yoga and Allbirds, Modern Retail\u00a0scooped\u00a0in July. Shopify\u2019s \u201cRobot & agent policy\u201d requires that \u201cbuy-for-me\u201d agents include a human review step and directs developers to integrate Shopify\u2019s checkout technology into their tools. Rather than naming particular AI companies, Shopify\u2019s policy applies broadly to automated agents. Shopify has\u00a0partnered with Perplexity\u00a0and is reportedly preparing to integrate with OpenAI to enable transactions through AI chatbots, per\u00a0The Financial Times.<\/p>\n

By comparison, Amazon appears to be taking a more stringent approach. Rather than accommodating outside AI firms, it has moved to keep them at arm\u2019s length as it builds out its own in-house tools like\u00a0Rufus, a shopping chatbot now being tested with advertising features,\u00a0Adweek\u00a0reported last year. As Modern Retail\u00a0previously reported, Amazon is also testing its own \u201cbuy-for-me\u201d feature that can purchase items from third-party websites for customers. The implication is that Amazon would rather control how AI is used for shopping on its website.<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s stance is notable given that major retailers like Walmart and eBay have not made any changes blocking AI bots from their sites, according to a review of their robots.txt files conducted by Modern Retail.<\/p>\n

Still, the question remains whether such restrictions can hold. Much of Amazon\u2019s catalog has already been scraped into existing AI training datasets, and robots.txt files rely on voluntary compliance. As Kaziuk\u0117nas put it, \u201cAmazon is a treasure trove of e-commerce data. It is notable that Amazon seems to be the only one actively fighting this.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n

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By Allison Smith \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 August 25, 2025 \u00a0\u2022 Ivy Liu This story was first published by Digiday sibling, Modern Retail<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7282,"featured_media":12848,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-website"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7282"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usaontheweb.com\/clone1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}