AddSearchBot

Operator

AddSearch Oy

Type

Crawler

Official page

addsearch.com

robots.txt token

AddSearchBot

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

AddSearchBot is a web crawler that indexes website content for AddSearch's AI-powered site search solution, collecting data to provide fast and accurate search results.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: AI Search Crawlers

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from AddSearchBot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AddSearchBot/1.0; +http://www.addsearch.com/bot; info@addsearch.com)

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

AddSearchBot

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow AddSearchBot

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: AddSearchBot
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

How Vireo counts AddSearchBot

Vireo keeps requests from AddSearchBot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Other bots, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over AddSearchBot's user agents.

Sources

• AddSearchBot information page (addsearch.com)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)