webzio-extended

Operator

Webz.io Ltd

Type

AI Data Scraper

Official page

docs.webz.io

robots.txt token

Webzio-Extended, webzio-extended

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under AI crawlers

What it does

Webzio-Extended is a web crawler used by Webz.io to maintain a repository of web crawl data that it sells to other companies, including those using it to train AI models.

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

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from webzio-extended carry user agents like these:

webzio-extended (+https://webz.io/bot.html)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Webzio-Extended/1.0)

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

webzio-extended

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 webzio-extended

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: Webzio-Extended
User-agent: webzio-extended
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 webzio-extended

Vireo keeps requests from webzio-extended 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 webzio-extended's user agents.

Sources

• webzio-extended information page (docs.webz.io)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)