bnf.fr_bot

What is bnf.fr_bot?

About

bnf.fr_bot is the official web crawler of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), systematically collecting and archiving digital content from French websites to preserve France's national documentary heritage. You can see how often bnf.fr_bot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.

Expected Behavior

Archivers visit websites on a roughly regular cadence, since snapshots are more useful when they're regularly spaced out. Popular websites will have more frequent visits since they are more likely to be queried in the historical database in the future.

Type

Detail

Insights

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Archivers

Top Visited Website Categories

Robots.txt

Should I Block bnf.fr_bot?

It's up to you. Digital archiving is generally done to preserve a historical record. If you don't want to be part of that record for some reason, you can block archivers.

How Do I Block bnf.fr_bot?

You can block bnf.fr_bot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: bnf.fr_bot # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/bnf-fr-bot
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.

References

• https://bnf.fr/