Amazon blocks the two OpenAI crawlers behind 50 million daily shopping queries

Amazon's advertising business runs at roughly $56 billion a year, about $153 million a day, and it depends on people browsing Amazon.com instead of shopping through ChatGPT, where ads can be bypassed ^[6][18]. Set against that, the 50 million shopping-related queries a day that OpenAI's own economists attribute to those agents come to 18.25 billion a year, so the entire Amazon ad business is worth about $3.07 for every ChatGPT shopping question ^[7][19]. The $3.07 is a ratio between two published figures, not an estimate of what an Amazon listing inside a ChatGPT answer would earn.

The reading that Amazon is fencing its catalog off from ChatGPT commerce has to survive an awkward fact: the file was already unfriendly. GPTBot, the crawler that scrapes content for model training, was blocked before these lines went in ^[4]. Amazon has spent recent months shutting out third-party crawlers tied to Meta, Google and Perplexity as well ^[5].

Jassy's complaint about outside agents is accuracy. Many of them, he said, give wrong pricing, delivery and inventory information: "We have to find a way, though, that makes the customer experience good," he said ^[12]. Amazon's public position on the file is that third-party shopping agents should "operate openly and respect service provider decisions" on whether to participate ^[16]. Amazon and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment ^[17].

I would expect the lines to stay. Amazon's $56 billion of advertising depends on the browsing session, and the ChatGPT referral traffic is going to Walmart, Target and Etsy ^[6][8], while Amazon spends on its own AI shopping tools instead of opening the door ^[20]. Scot Wingo, who writes the Substack Retailgentic and founded ReFiBuy, said Amazon "doesn't want to just be the back end of the internet" and that "They want to be the front door, and they're going to fight this for quite a while, would be my guess" ^[13]. Two developments would break that view: the disallow lines coming back out of the file, or Amazon naming the third-party agent partner Jassy described. The other possibility is duller, which is that these blocks are aimed at price scraping and automated checkout generally, with OpenAI the latest name on a list that already ran to four companies ^[5]. Tyler Cowen asked Sam Altman at a Berkeley conference last month whether Amazon would fold and join or fight back and do its own thing. "I have no idea," Altman said, and added, "If I were them, I would fight back" ^[10].