Training crawlers
Scrapy is a bot operated by Zyte that collects pages used to train AI models. "AI and machine learning applications often need large amounts of quality data, and web data extraction is a fast, efficient way to build structured data sets.". 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
"Scrapy"
Checked against
Nothing published
Live check
No operator check exists for Scrapy. This still shows what the address really is.
Reference
| User agent | ScrapyToken only: match on the substring. |
|---|---|
| Operator | Zyte |
| Purpose | Scrapes data for a variety of uses including training AI. |
| Respects robots.txt | No policy |
| Verification method | Claim onlyNone published, user agent only Scrapy is an open source framework, not one operator. The token means somebody ran the default settings; anybody can change it, so seeing it says more about the operator's carelessness than their identity. |
| Crawl pattern | Not published |
| Robots.txt tokens | Scrapy |
| Operator documentation | None published |
"AI and machine learning applications often need large amounts of quality data, and web data extraction is a fast, efficient way to build structured data sets."
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: Scrapy
Disallow: /User-agent: Scrapy
Allow: /User-agent: Scrapy
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking Scrapy keeps your pages out of the next training run. It does not remove anything already collected, and it has no effect on how the site ranks in ordinary search.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
Scrapy is a bot operated by Zyte that collects pages used to train AI models. "AI and machine learning applications often need large amounts of quality data, and web data extraction is a fast, efficient way to build structured data sets.". 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 Scrapy 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. Scrapy is an open source framework, not one operator. The token means somebody ran the default settings; anybody can change it, so seeing it says more about the operator's carelessness than their identity. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.
Add the Scrapy 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 Scrapy keeps your pages out of the next training run. It does not remove anything already collected, and it has no effect on how the site ranks in ordinary search.