Thinkbot

Operator

Thinkbot

Type

Crawler

robots.txt token

Thinkbot

Follows robots.txt

No, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

Collects data for analysis on AI usage and automation.

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Insights on AI integration and automation.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from Thinkbot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Thinkbot/0.5.8; +In_the_test_phase,_if_the_Thinkbot_brings_you_trouble,_please_block_its_IP_address._Thank_you.)

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

(ABEvalBot|AdsTxtCrawlerTP|ArtelLeadRadar|DNSResearchBot|Dormouse|FinderGo|FormFinder|GitCrawlerBot|HanaleiBot|HubSeedsBot|ImportDomains|KenyaDomainScorer|LetrixLabs|PhishBucketRust|PostitLeadDiscovery|PrivacyPolicyBot|ProductLookoutBot|Robozilla|Secweb-Sectxt|SeoCherryBot|ShopifyChecker|SitemapCrawler\.de|SleepBot|StudyBot|The Knowledge AI|Thinkbot|ThinkChaos|TprAdsTxtCrawler|WATCrawler|ProspectorBR)

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 Thinkbot

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: Thinkbot
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 Thinkbot

Vireo keeps requests from Thinkbot 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 Thinkbot's user agents.

Sources

• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)