Channel3Bot
Channel3Bot is a bot that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them, and its operator has not been publicly identified. The token has been seen in server logs, but no operator has published documentation for it. 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.
No operator has published documentation for this token. Everything below is what can be established from the string itself and from how the traffic behaves. We would rather say that than fill the gap with a guess.
Channel3Bot at a glance
| User agent | Channel3BotToken only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header. |
|---|---|
| Operator | Not publicly identified |
| Purpose | AI search crawlers |
| 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 | Channel3Bot |
| Operator documentation | None published |
Allow or block Channel3Bot
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.
User-agent: Channel3Bot
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: Channel3Bot
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: Channel3Bot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /searchEdit the Disallow paths to match your own account, checkout and search URLs.
What blocking actually costs you
Blocking Channel3Bot 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.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really Channel3Bot?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Channel3Bot 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.
Related crawlers
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.