heritrix

Last updated 10 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.

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

Activity on Your Website

Half of your website's 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

of top websites are currently blocking heritrix in some way

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

User Agent Token	Description
`heritrix`	Should match instances of heritrix

You can block heritrix or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt.

# robots.txt
# This should block heritrix

User-agent: heritrix
Disallow: /

Instead of doing this manually, you can generate a robots.txt using the API or WordPress plugin that stays up to date with the agent list automatically. The WordPress plugin can also enforce your robots.txt and block agents who try to ignore the rules.

Set Up Your Robots.txt