What is Netcraft?
Netcraft is a web crawler that conducts comprehensive internet surveys, analyzing web server technologies and infrastructure across millions of websites to provide market intelligence. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Category
Expected Behavior
Netcraft visits with a shopping list. Expect focused, repeated requests to the pages its clients monitor, like pricing, product listings, and announcements, on schedules ranging from hourly to weekly. Sites outside a client's watchlist may never see it at all.
Overview
| Operated By | Netcraft |
| 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 Netcraft in their robots.txt files.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
As of July 6, 2026, 3.3% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
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.
Netcraft's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Netcraft Web Server Survey) |
Access other known user agents and IP addresses using the Enterprise API.
How To Block Netcraft
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Netcraft from accessing your entire website. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Netcraft # https://knownagents.com/agents/netcraft
Disallow: /Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Netcraft?
Decide who benefits. Netcraft collects pricing, product, and brand data for its operator's clients, and those clients can include your competitors. Allow it if visibility in market research matters to you. Block it if you would rather not hand competitors structured data about your business. Almost none of the top websites we track have robots.txt rules for Netcraft right now.
Does Netcraft Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. Netcraft 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 Netcraft actually honors it.
Does Netcraft Access Private Content?
Public business information is the target. Pricing pages, product listings, and announcements are what its clients pay for. Netcraft has no special access, but assume everything you publish openly gets collected.
Why Is Netcraft Visiting My Website?
A client of Netcraft is monitoring your market, your brand, or you specifically. Expect Netcraft's visits to concentrate on pages with business value, like pricing and product pages.
How Can I Tell if Netcraft Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Netcraft 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 "Netcraft". Look for repeated visits to pricing, product, and news pages. Keep in mind that Netcraft 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.