Panscient

Operator

Panscient, Inc.

Type

Crawler

Official page

panscient.com

robots.txt token

Panscient, panscient.com

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

Compiles data on businesses and business professionals that is structured using AI and machine learning.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Data collection and analysis using machine learning and AI.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

Crawl frequency, per ai.robots.txt: The Panscient web crawler will request a page at most once every second from the same domain name or the same IP address.

User agent

Requests from Panscient carry a user agent like this:

panscient.com

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

panscient\.com

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 Panscient

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

User-agent: Panscient
User-agent: panscient.com
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 Panscient

Vireo keeps requests from Panscient 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 Panscient's user agents.

Sources

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