Does YaK respect robots.txt?

Not documented. No operator statement says whether YaK reads robots.txt, so add the rule but verify in your logs that the requests actually stop.

Add the YaK 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.

IPScanner

Other automated crawlers

YaK

Q: How do I verify a request really came from YaK?

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.

YaK is a bot operated by Meltwater that crawls the web automatically. Retrieves data used for Meltwater's AI enabled consumer intelligence suite. 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.

YaK at a glance

Reference data for the YaK crawler
User agent	`YaK` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Meltwater
Purpose	According to the Meltwater Consumer Intelligence page 'By applying AI, data science, and market research expertise to a live feed of global data sources, we transform unstructured data into actionable insights allowing better decision-making'.
Respects robots.txt	Not documented
Verification method	None 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	`YaK`
Operator documentation	None published

Retrieves data used for Meltwater's AI enabled consumer intelligence suite

robots.txt

Allow or block YaK

Paste one of these into the robots.txt file at the root of your domain. Rules are per token, so a block on one crawler leaves every other bot untouched.

Block YaK

User-agent: YaK
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow YaK

User-agent: YaK
Allow: /

Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.

Allow, except the pages you never want quoted

User-agent: YaK
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking YaK stops this specific token. Check your logs afterwards, because operators that ignore robots.txt often come back under a different name.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really YaK?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy YaK precisely because site owners allow it. 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.

Paste the IP address from your access log below. You will see whether it belongs to a hosting provider, a residential proxy pool or a Tor exit, plus the ASN that announces it, which is what tells you whether the claim holds up.

Datacenter IP detectionNearly every real AI crawler egresses from cloud ranges. A residential IP claiming to be one is the first thing to check.IP reputation checkSee whether the address behind a fake crawler hit has a history of abuse elsewhere.Residential proxy detectionScrapers that get blocked by user agent often come back through residential proxy pools.

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Agentscan

Identify crawlers automatically instead of by hand

Agentscan checks a request against published crawler ranges, reverse DNS and hosting data, then returns a verdict your edge can act on. One call per request, no range files to keep up to date.

How Agentscan works API reference Pricing What is my IP

FAQ

YaK