Other automated crawlers
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.
Request says
"YaK"
Checked against
Nothing published
Live check
No operator check exists for YaK. This still shows what the address really is.
Reference
| User agent | YaKToken only: match on the substring. |
|---|---|
| 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 | 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 | YaK |
| Operator documentation | None published |
Retrieves data used for Meltwater's AI enabled consumer intelligence suite
robots.txt
Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.
User-agent: YaK
Disallow: /User-agent: YaK
Allow: /User-agent: YaK
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.
Blocking YaK stops this specific token. Check your logs afterwards, because operators that ignore robots.txt often come back under a different name.
Build a file for every crawlerFAQ
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.
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.
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 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.
Blocking YaK stops this specific token. Check your logs afterwards, because operators that ignore robots.txt often come back under a different name.