What is bnf.fr_bot?
bnf.fr_bot is the official web crawler of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), systematically collecting and archiving digital content from French websites to preserve France's national documentary heritage. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
bnf.fr_bot returns on a cadence to capture full snapshots of your pages for the historical record. Expect complete page fetches rather than metadata checks, at a frequency that rises with your site's popularity and how often your content changes.
Overview
| Operated By | Bibliothèque nationale de France |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 6, 2026 |
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
As of July 6, 2026, 1% of top websites block bnf.fr_bot in their robots.txt files.
Overall Archiver Traffic
As of July 6, 2026, 0.1% of all web traffic came from archivers.
Top Visited Website Categories
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.
bnf.fr_bot's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bnf.fr_bot; +https://www.bnf.fr/fr/capture-de-votre-site-web-par-le-robot-de-la-bnf) |
Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.
How To Block bnf.fr_bot
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block bnf.fr_bot from accessing your entire website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: bnf.fr_bot # https://knownagents.com/agents/bnf-fr-bot
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block bnf.fr_bot?
Almost never. bnf.fr_bot preserves snapshots of your pages so the record survives redesigns, migrations, and dead links. Blocking only stops new captures. Snapshots that already exist stay public until you ask the archive itself to remove them. For comparison, 1% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for bnf.fr_bot.
Does bnf.fr_bot Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. bnf.fr_bot is expected to honor robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms bnf.fr_bot actually honors it.
Does bnf.fr_bot Access Private Content?
It archives only what any anonymous visitor can see. Anything public at crawl time can stay retrievable in bnf.fr_bot's archive long after you take it down.
Why Is bnf.fr_bot Visiting My Website?
bnf.fr_bot is preserving your pages as part of the historical record. Visits recur on a schedule so the archive can capture how your content changes over time.
How Can I Tell if bnf.fr_bot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks bnf.fr_bot 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 "bnf.fr_bot". Look for periodic full page captures that recur on a schedule. Keep in mind that bnf.fr_bot 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.