Amazon Kendra

Operator

Amazon.com, Inc.

Type

Crawler

Official page

docs.aws.amazon.com

robots.txt token

amazon-kendra

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate intelligent search service that enables your users to search unstructured data using natural language. It returns specific answers to questions, giving users an experience that's close to interacting with a human expert. It is highly scalable and capable of meeting performance demands, tightly integrated with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Lex, and offers enterprise-grade security.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Collects data for AI natural language search

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from Amazon Kendra carry a user agent like this:

amazon-kendra-customer-id-<AccountID>

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

amazon-kendra

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Amazon Kendra

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: amazon-kendra
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

How Vireo counts Amazon Kendra

Vireo keeps requests from Amazon Kendra out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Other bots, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Amazon Kendra's user agents.

Sources

• Amazon Kendra information page (docs.aws.amazon.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)