heritrix

Last updated 19 hours ago.

What is heritrix?

About

heritrix is an archiver operated by Internet Archive. 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 heritrix visits your website.

Detail

Operator Internet Archive

Type

Archiver
Snapshots websites for historical databases

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.

Insights

heritrix 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 Analytics

Other Websites

0%
0% of top websites are blocking heritrix
Learn How →

Access Control

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.

Using Robots.txt

You can block heritrix 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
heritrix Should match instances of heritrix
# robots.txt
# This should block heritrix

User-agent: heritrix
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