Autonomous agents
iAskBot is a bot operated by iAsk that browses the web on its own to finish multi-step tasks. iAskBot and the iaskspider tokens belong to iAsk.Ai, a question-answering search engine. 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
"iAskBot"
Checked against
Nothing published
Live check
No operator check exists for iAskBot. This still shows what the address really is.
Reference
| User agent | iAskBotToken only: match on the substring. |
|---|---|
| Operator | iAsk |
| Purpose | Autonomous agents |
| 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 | iAskBotiaskspideriaskspider/2.0 |
| Operator documentation | None published |
iAskBot and the iaskspider tokens belong to iAsk.Ai, a question-answering search engine. It crawls pages so it can quote them in generated answers.
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: iAskBot
User-agent: iaskspider
User-agent: iaskspider/2.0
Disallow: /User-agent: iAskBot
User-agent: iaskspider
User-agent: iaskspider/2.0
Allow: /User-agent: iAskBot
User-agent: iaskspider
User-agent: iaskspider/2.0
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking iAskBot stops automated sessions that fill forms, click through flows and read pages the way a logged-in user would. Rate limits and challenges usually work better here than a robots.txt line.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
iAskBot is a bot operated by iAsk that browses the web on its own to finish multi-step tasks. iAskBot and the iaskspider tokens belong to iAsk.Ai, a question-answering search engine. 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 iAskBot 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 these user-agent tokens (iAskBot, iaskspider, iaskspider/2.0) 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 iAskBot stops automated sessions that fill forms, click through flows and read pages the way a logged-in user would. Rate limits and challenges usually work better here than a robots.txt line.