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.

Agent Type

Expected Behavior

Archivers crawl websites to create historical snapshots for preservation purposes. They typically visit on a regular cadence to build a chronological record of how content changes over time. Crawl frequency varies based on site popularity and content update patterns. Unlike search crawlers, archivers aim to capture and store complete page states rather than extract information for indexing.

Detail

Insights

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Archivers

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://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/