Awesome Blow (Combat)
This creature can send opponents flying.
Prerequisites: Str 25, Power Attack, Improved Bull Rush, size Large or larger.
Benefit: As a standard action, the creature may perform an awesome blow combat maneuver. If the creature's maneuver succeeds against a corporeal opponent smaller than itself, its opponent takes damage (typically slam damage plus Strength bonus) and is knocked flying 10 feet in a direction of the attacking creature's choice and falls prone. The attacking creature can only push the opponent in a straight line, and the opponent can't move closer to the attacking creature than the square it started in. If an obstacle prevents the completion of the opponent's move, the opponent and the obstacle each take 1d6 points of damage, and the opponent is knocked prone in the space adjacent to the obstacle.
Performing a Combat Maneuver: When performing a combat maneuver, you must use an action appropriate to the maneuver you are attempting to perform. While many combat maneuvers can be performed as part of an attack action, full-attack action, or attack of opportunity (in place of a melee attack), others require a specific action. Unless otherwise noted, performing a combat maneuver provokes an attack of opportunity from the target of the maneuver. If you are hit by the target, you take the damage normally and apply that amount as a penalty to the attack roll to perform the maneuver. If your target is immobilized, unconscious, or otherwise incapacitated, your maneuver automatically succeeds (treat as if you rolled a natural 20 on the attack roll). If your target is stunned, you receive a +4 bonus on your attack roll to perform a combat maneuver against it.
So, performing an awesome blow provokes AoOs on the, um, awesome blower? Right? (If so an Improved Awesome Blow feat really should exist, if only for Brothers of the Seal.)
There is no feat called Improved Awesome Blow, and considering this feat used to be intended to be for monsters only, I would so that Awesome Blow does not provoke. It would have much larger ramifications for monsters in the bestiary than it does for player characters.
I would assume that the general rules for combat maneuvers apply to Awesome Blow, including provoking an AoO.
If the creature is big enough, it will often be using this against enemies out of reach anyway, unless its target has a reach weapon or Long Arms or some such.