heritrix

What is heritrix?

About

heritrix is an archiver operated by Internet Archive. If you think this is incorrect or can provide additional detail about its purpose, please contact us. You can see how often heritrix 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

Archiver

Snapshots websites for historical databases

Detail

Operated By	Internet Archive
Last Updated	1 day ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

1% of top websites are blocking heritrix

Learn How →

Country of Origin

Germany

heritrix normally visits from Germany

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Archivers

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Robots.txt

Should I Block heritrix?

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 heritrix?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.

Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block heritrix 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.

User Agent String Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; heritrix/3.10.0 +https://corpora.wortschatz-leipzig.de/crawler_faq.html)

# robots.txt
# This should block heritrix

User-agent: heritrix
Disallow: /