What Is AdvBot?

AdvBot is an uncategorized agent. If you think this is incorrect or can provide additional detail about its purpose, please let us know. You can see how often AdvBot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.

Agent Type

Expected Behavior

Uncategorized agents have unknown or unclear purposes, making their behavior difficult to predict. They may be legitimate tools like search crawlers, monitoring services, or research bots, or they could be unauthorized scrapers, security scanners, or experimental projects. If you encounter significant traffic from an uncategorized agent, investigating its user agent string and IP addresses may provide clues about its purpose and operator.

Detail

Robots.txt

In this example, all pages are blocked. You can customize which pages are off-limits by swapping out / for a different disallowed path.

User-agent: AdvBot # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/advbot
Disallow: /

Frequently Asked Questions About AdvBot

Should I Block AdvBot?

Monitor first, then decide. Unknown agents require investigation to understand their purpose and behavior. Check their crawl patterns, resource usage, and whether they respect rate limits. Block if they appear malicious or consume excessive resources without clear benefit.

How Do I Block AdvBot?

If you want to, you can block or limit AdvBot's access by configuring user agent token rules in your robots.txt file. The best way to do this is using Automatic Robots.txt, which blocks all agents of this type and updates continuously as new agents are released. While the vast majority of agents operated by reputable companies honor these robots.txt directives, bad actors may choose to ignore them entirely. In that case, you'll need to implement alternative blocking methods such as firewall rules or server-level restrictions. You can verify whether AdvBot is respecting your rules by setting up Agent Analytics to monitor its visits to your website.

Will Blocking AdvBot Hurt My SEO?

The SEO impact of blocking uncategorized agents is unpredictable since their purpose is unknown. They could be legitimate search crawlers, beneficial monitoring tools, or harmful scrapers. Monitor your search performance closely after blocking to identify any unexpected ranking changes.

Does AdvBot Access Private Content?

The access scope of uncategorized agents is unknown and could range from public content only to attempts at accessing private or protected resources. Without identifying the agent's purpose or operator, it's impossible to determine whether they respect privacy boundaries or attempt to access restricted content. Monitor their behavior patterns for clues about their intended scope.

How Can I Tell if AdvBot Is Visiting My Website?

Setting up Agent Analytics will give you realtime visibility into AdvBot visiting your website, along with hundreds of other AI agents, crawlers, and scrapers. This will also let you measure human traffic to your website coming from AI search and chat LLM platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

Why Is AdvBot Visiting My Website?

AdvBot found your site through unknown methods and for unclear purposes. It may have discovered your site through standard web crawling, following links, or by specifically targeting your domain. Without more information about this agent, it's difficult to determine exactly why it's visiting your content.

How Can I Authenticate Visits From AdvBot?

Agent Analytics authenticates agent visits from many agents, letting you know whether each one was actually from that agent, or spoofed by a bad actor. This helps you identify suspicious traffic patterns and make informed decisions about blocking or allowing specific user agents.