aiHitBot

Operator

aiHit

Type

Crawler

Official page

aihitdata.com

robots.txt token

aiHitBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

Scrapes data for AI systems.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: A massive, artificial intelligence/machine learning, automated system.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from aiHitBot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; aiHitBot/2.9; +https://www.aihitdata.com/about)

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

aiHitBot

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 aiHitBot

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: aiHitBot
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 aiHitBot

Vireo keeps requests from aiHitBot 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 aiHitBot's user agents.

Sources

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