ExaBot

Operator

Dassault Systèmes

Type

Crawler

Official page

exabot.com

robots.txt token

ExaBot

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Search engines

What it does

ExaBot is a web crawler that indexes web content to power Exa's AI search engine and semantic search APIs for AI applications.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: AI Data Providers

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from ExaBot carry user agents like these:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Exabot/3.0; +http://www.exabot.com/go/robot)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Exabot/3.0 (BiggerBetter); +http://www.exabot.com/go/robot)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.5; Linux) KHTML/3.5.5 (like Gecko) (Exabot-Thumbnails)

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

Exabot|ExaleadCloudview

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 ExaBot

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: ExaBot
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 ExaBot

Vireo keeps requests from ExaBot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Search engines, 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 ExaBot's user agents.

Sources

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