WARDBot

Operator

W.A.R.D. LLC

Type

Site Monitor

Official page

ward.ai

robots.txt token

WARDBot

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Uptime monitors

What it does

WARDBot is an AI data scraper operated by WEBSPARK. It's not currently known to be artificially intelligent or AI-related. If you think that's incorrect or can provide more detail about its purpose, please contact us.

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

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from WARDBot carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; WARDBot/1.0; http://ward.ai/robot)

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

WARDBot

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 WARDBot

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: WARDBot
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 WARDBot

Vireo keeps requests from WARDBot out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Uptime monitors, 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 WARDBot's user agents.

Sources

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