What is IABot?
IABot (InternetArchiveBot) is a Wikipedia bot operated by the Internet Archive that combats link rot by finding dead links on Wikipedia articles and adding archived versions from the Wayback Machine to preserve reference accessibility. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
IABot 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 | Wikimedia Foundation |
| 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, 0% of top websites block IABot in their robots.txt files.
Overall Archiver Traffic
As of July 6, 2026, 0.1% of all web traffic came from archivers.
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.
How To Block IABot
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block IABot from accessing your entire website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: IABot # https://knownagents.com/agents/iabot
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block IABot?
Almost never. IABot 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. Almost none of the top websites we track have robots.txt rules for IABot right now.
Does IABot Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. IABot 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 IABot actually honors it.
Does IABot Access Private Content?
It archives only what any anonymous visitor can see. Anything public at crawl time can stay retrievable in IABot's archive long after you take it down.
Why Is IABot Visiting My Website?
IABot 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 IABot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks IABot 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 "IABot". Look for periodic full page captures that recur on a schedule. Keep in mind that IABot 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.