What is Automaton?

Automaton is a developer helper operated by Automaton. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.

Category

Expected Behavior

Automaton's traffic is as regular as a cron job, because it usually is one. Uptime monitors hit the same endpoint every few minutes, while performance and audit tools run deeper scans on demand. Expect narrow, repetitive access to specific pages rather than crawling.

Overview

This data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.

Automaton's User Agent

Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.

How To Block Automaton

Add this rule to your robots.txt file to request that Automaton not access your website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.

User-agent: Automaton # https://knownagents.com/agents/automaton
Disallow: /

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I Block Automaton?

Only if nobody you work with uses it. Automaton is the kind of tool a team points at its own site for uptime checks, performance tests, and audits. If someone on your team relies on it, blocking it silently breaks their monitoring. Almost none of the top websites we track have robots.txt rules for Automaton right now.

Does Automaton Respect Robots.txt?

No. Automaton is not expected to honor robots.txt, so a disallow rule only states your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then confirm in Agent Analytics that its requests actually stop.

Does Automaton Access Private Content?

Only if its owner sets that up. Monitoring tools check whatever they are configured to check, which can include staging sites and private health endpoints when a team grants access. Uninvited, Automaton sees only public pages.

Why Is Automaton Visiting My Website?

Someone pointed Automaton at your site, most likely your own team. Uptime monitors, performance testers, and audit tools only visit the sites they are configured to watch.

How Can I Tell if Automaton Is Visiting My Website?

Agent Analytics tracks Automaton visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "Automaton". Look for regular checks of the same pages or endpoints, often minutes apart. Keep in mind that Automaton doesn't publish a verification method, so any client can claim its user agent string and a log match is a hint rather than proof.