Netcraft
What is Netcraft?
About
Netcraft is a web crawler that conducts comprehensive internet surveys, analyzing web server technologies and infrastructure across millions of websites to provide market intelligence. You can see how often Netcraft visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.
Expected Behavior
The behavior of intelligence gatherers depends on the goals of their clients. For example, a client might be interested in brand sentiment, in which case the agent would crawl related social media or blog posts at a more frequent rate than unrelated websites.
Type
Detail
| Operated By | Netcraft |
| Last Updated | 15 hours ago |
Insights
Top Website Robots.txts
Country of Origin
Global Traffic
The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Intelligence Gatherers
Robots.txt
Should I Block Netcraft?
Probably not, especially if you benefit from an intelligence gathering service yourself. However, you might choose to block them if you're concerned about things like server resource usage.
How Do I Block Netcraft?
You can block Netcraft 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/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Netcraft SSL Server Survey - contact info@netcraft.com) |
# In your robots.txt ...
User-agent: Netcraft # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/netcraft
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.