IABot

What is IABot?

About

IABot (InternetArchiveBot) is a Wikipedia bot operated by the Internet Archive that combats link rot by finding dead links on Wikipedia articles and adding archived versions from the Wayback Machine to preserve reference accessibility. You can see how often IABot 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 18 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

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

Country of Origin

Unknown
IABot has no known country of origin

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 IABot?

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 IABot?

⚠️ 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 IABot 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.

# robots.txt
# This should block IABot

User-agent: IABot
Disallow: /

References