AI search crawlers
ExaSearchBot is a bot operated by Exa that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. ExaSearchBot is a web crawler operated by Exa that discovers and indexes public web pages so their content can be found, retrieved, and cited through Exa. No IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine and a robots.txt rule alone will not stop a forgery.
Request says
"ExaSearchBot"
Checked against
Nothing published
Live check
No operator check exists for ExaSearchBot. This still shows what the address really is.
Reference
| User agent | ExaSearchBotToken only: match on the substring. |
|---|---|
| Operator | Exa |
| Purpose | AI search crawlers |
| Respects robots.txt | No policy |
| Verification method | Claim onlyNone published, user agent only No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | ExaSearchBot |
| Operator documentation | None published |
ExaSearchBot is a web crawler operated by Exa that discovers and indexes public web pages so their content can be found, retrieved, and cited through Exa.
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: ExaSearchBot
Disallow: /User-agent: ExaSearchBot
Allow: /User-agent: ExaSearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking ExaSearchBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
ExaSearchBot is a bot operated by Exa that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. ExaSearchBot is a web crawler operated by Exa that discovers and indexes public web pages so their content can be found, retrieved, and cited through Exa. No IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine and a robots.txt rule alone will not stop a forgery.
Not documented. No operator statement says whether ExaSearchBot reads robots.txt, so add the rule but verify in your logs that the requests actually stop.
You cannot, at least not from the request itself. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.
Add the ExaSearchBot token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.
Blocking ExaSearchBot takes the site out of the index behind its answers, so it stops being cited there. If referral traffic from AI answers matters to you, block the training crawler instead and leave this one alone.