YaK

Operator

Linkfluence SAS

Type

Crawler

Official page

linkfluence.com

robots.txt token

YaK

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

Retrieves data used for Meltwater's AI enabled consumer intelligence suite

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: According to the [Meltwater Consumer Intelligence page](https://www.meltwater.com/en/suite/consumer-intelligence) 'By applying AI, data science, and market research expertise to a live feed of global data sources, we transform unstructured data into actionable insights allowing better decision-making'.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from YaK carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YaK/1.0; http://linkfluence.com/; bot@linkfluence.com)

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

YaK/

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 YaK

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: YaK
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 YaK

Vireo keeps requests from YaK 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 YaK's user agents.

Sources

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