ShapBot

Operator

Parallel Web Systems Inc.

Type

AI Data Scraper

Official page

docs.parallel.ai

robots.txt token

ShapBot

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

ShapBot is a web crawler by Parallel that collects and structures web content to power its search, extraction, and deep research APIs, providing AI agents with high-accur...

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

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from ShapBot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ShapBot/0.1.0

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

ShapBot

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 ShapBot

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: ShapBot
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 ShapBot

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

Because it's an AI crawler, its requests also count toward the pages AI crawlers took, which Vireo shows next to the readers AI assistants sent back. See how the AI assistants card works.

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

Sources

• ShapBot information page (docs.parallel.ai)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)