ArchiveBot
What is ArchiveBot?
About
ArchiveBot is an intelligence gatherer operated by Wikimedia. It's not currently known to be artificially intelligent or AI-related. If you think that's incorrect or can provide more detail about its purpose, please contact us.
You can set up agent analytics to see when ArchiveBot visits your website.
Detail
| Operator | Wikimedia |
| Documentation | https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/InternetArchiveBot/FAQ_for_sysadmins |
Type
Expected Behavior
The behavior of intelligence gatherers depends on the goals of their clients. For example, a client might be interested in brand sentiment, in which case the agent would crawl related social media or blog posts at a more frequent rate than unrelated websites.
Insights
ArchiveBot Visiting Your Website
Half of your traffic probably comes from artificial agents, and there are more of them every day. Track their activity with the API or WordPress plugin.
Set Up Agent AnalyticsOther Websites
Access Control
Should I Block ArchiveBot?
Probably not, especially if you benefit from an intelligence gathering service yourself. However, you might choose to block them if you're concerned about things like server resource usage.
Using Robots.txt
You can block ArchiveBot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. We recommend setting up agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.
| User Agent Token | Description |
|---|---|
ArchiveBot |
Should match instances of ArchiveBot |
# robots.txt
# This should block ArchiveBot
User-agent: ArchiveBot
Disallow: /
Instead of doing this manually, you can use the API or Wordpress plugin to keep your robots.txt updated with the latest known AI scrapers, crawlers, and assistants automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt