What is Known Agent?
Known Agent is a test bot operated by Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors), a service that helps website owners track, control, and optimize for bots and crawlers. This bot is used for development and testing purposes as part of their platform that provides analytics on bot traffic and automatic robots.txt management. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
Known Agent'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
| Operated By | Known Agents |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
| 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 Known Agent in their robots.txt files.
Overall Developer Helper Traffic
As of July 6, 2026, 0.6% of all web traffic came from developer helpers.
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.
Known Agent's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Known Agent/1.0; +https://knownagents.com) |
Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.
How To Block Known Agent
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to request that Known Agent not access your website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Known Agent # https://knownagents.com/agents/known-agent
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Known Agent?
Only if nobody you work with uses it. Known Agent 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 Known Agent right now.
Does Known Agent Respect Robots.txt?
No. Known Agent 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 Known Agent 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, Known Agent sees only public pages.
Why Is Known Agent Visiting My Website?
Someone pointed Known Agent 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 Known Agent Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Known Agent visits and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper alongside it, then authenticates each visit against Known Agent's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "Known Agent". Look for regular checks of the same pages or endpoints, often minutes apart. A log match is still not proof, because any bot can claim to be Known Agent.