Offline Explorer
What is Offline Explorer?
About
Offline Explorer is a scraper operated by MetaProducts. 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 Offline Explorer visits your website.
Detail
Operator | MetaProducts |
Type
Expected Behavior
Due to the wide variety of use cases, there's no way to accurately predict visitation behavior. Scrapers are notorious for ignoring robots.txt rules and accessing disallowed content. This is especially true if they're dispatched to achieve a specific goal rather than for some general purpose.
Insights
Offline Explorer 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 AnalyticsOther Websites
Access Control
Should I Block Offline Explorer?
Probably. Scrapers usually download publicly available internet content, which is freely accessible by default. However, you might want to block them if you don't want your content to be used for unauthorized purposes.
Using Robots.txt
You can block Offline Explorer 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 |
---|---|
Offline Explorer |
Should match instances of Offline Explorer |
# robots.txt
# This should block Offline Explorer
User-agent: Offline Explorer
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