archive.org_bot

What is archive.org_bot?

About

archive.org_bot is the Internet Archive's web crawler for the Wayback Machine, systematically crawling and preserving publicly accessible web pages for historical record and research. You can see how often archive.org_bot visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics.

Agent Type

Expected Behavior

Archivers crawl websites to create historical snapshots for preservation purposes. They typically visit on a regular cadence to build a chronological record of how content changes over time. Crawl frequency varies based on site popularity and content update patterns. Unlike search crawlers, archivers aim to capture and store complete page states rather than extract information for indexing.

Detail

Insights

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Archivers

Top Visited Website Categories

Robots.txt

Should I Block archive.org_bot?

It's up to you. Digital archiving is generally done to preserve a historical record. If you don't want to be part of that record for some reason, you can block archivers.

How Do I Block archive.org_bot?

You can block archive.org_bot or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors Agent Analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

# In your robots.txt ...

User-agent: archive.org_bot # https://darkvisitors.com/agents/archive-org-bot
Disallow: /

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Editing Is Not Scalable

New agents are created every day. We recommend setting up Dark Visitors Automatic Robots.txt if you want to block all agents of this type.

References

• https://archive.org/help/