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

Intelligence Gatherer
Searches for useful insights

Detail

Operated By Netcraft
Last Updated 5 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

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

Country of Origin

Ireland
Netcraft normally visits from Ireland

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Intelligence Gatherers

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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?

⚠️ 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 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) 
# robots.txt
# This should block Netcraft

User-agent: Netcraft
Disallow: /

References