newsai
newsai is a bot that browses the web on its own to finish multi-step tasks, and its operator has not been publicly identified. User-agent string doen't contain an URL and there multiple sites using the newsai brand. 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.
newsai at a glance
| User agent | newsaiToken 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 data scraper |
| 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 | newsai |
| Operator documentation | None published |
User-agent string doen't contain an URL and there multiple sites using the newsai brand.
Allow or block newsai
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: newsai
Disallow: /Blocks every path for this crawler only.
User-agent: newsai
Allow: /Explicit allow. Useful when a wildcard rule above it would otherwise catch this crawler.
User-agent: newsai
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 newsai 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.
Block every crawler in the directory at onceIs that really newsai?
A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy newsai 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.