# Amazonbot ignores robots.txt and falls for honeypot trap, user reports

> A Hacker News user reports that Amazonbot aggressively scraped their personal website despite robots.txt directives and was caught accessing a hidden honeypot with fake HTTP endpoints.

- Canonical: https://extractfeed.io/story/amazonbot-ignores-robots-txt-and-falls-for-honeypot-trap-use-8a342c1/
- JSON: https://extractfeed.io/api/v1/stories/amazonbot-ignores-robots-txt-and-falls-for-honeypot-trap-use-8a342c1.json
- Beat: Legal & Policy · Evidence: Reported · Type/significance: incident/3 · First seen: 2026-09-08T22:44:24.611761+00:00 · Updated: 2026-09-08T22:44:24.611761+00:00 · Edition: 2026-11-05
- Framing: model-written (headline, standfirst, why it matters, tags); source facts deterministic

## Briefing
- Hacker News: A Hacker News user reports that Amazonbot aggressively scraped their personal website despite robots.txt directives and was caught accessing a hidden honeypot with fake HTTP endpoints.

## Why it matters
This incident highlights ongoing tensions between web publishers and large AI crawlers that disregard standard opt-out mechanisms like robots.txt. The use of a honeypot to expose non-compliant scraping demonstrates a growing arms race between site owners and bot operators, with implications for trust, bandwidth costs, and the effectiveness of existing blocking tools.

## Sources
- Reported · Hacker News · 2026-08-01 — [Tell HN: Amazonbot aggressively scraping my website and ignoring robots.txt](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49137359)

## Watch next
Will Amazon update Amazonbot's behavior to respect robots.txt after this public exposure?

Topics: Amazon, Hacker News, amazonbot, robots-txt, honeypot, web-scraping, ai-crawlers

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