Does ImagesiftBot respect robots.txt?

Yes. The operator documents that ImagesiftBot reads robots.txt and follows Disallow rules for its own token. Rules take effect on the next fetch of the file, which can be hours or days after you publish them.

How do I verify a request really came from ImagesiftBot?

You cannot, at least not from the request itself. Crawls for images rather than text, so a text-only robots.txt review can miss it entirely. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.

How do I block ImagesiftBot?

Add the ImagesiftBot 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

AI search crawlers

ImagesiftBot

ImagesiftBot is a bot operated by ImageSift that indexes pages so an AI answer engine can cite them. Once images and text are downloaded from a webpage, ImageSift analyzes this data from the page and stores the information in an index. It is documented as honouring robots.txt, but no IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine.

ImagesiftBot at a glance

Reference data for the ImagesiftBot crawler
User agent	`ImagesiftBot` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	ImageSift
Purpose	ImageSiftBot is a web crawler that scrapes the internet for publicly available images to support their suite of web intelligence products
Respects robots.txt	Yes, documentedsource
Verification method	None published, user agent only Crawls for images rather than text, so a text-only robots.txt review can miss it entirely. https://imagesift.com/about
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`ImagesiftBot`
Operator documentation	https://imagesift.com/about

Once images and text are downloaded from a webpage, ImageSift analyzes this data from the page and stores the information in an index. Their web intelligence products use this index to enable search and retrieval of similar images.

robots.txt

Allow or block ImagesiftBot

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 ImagesiftBot

User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow ImagesiftBot

User-agent: ImagesiftBot
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: ImagesiftBot
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 ImagesiftBot 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 once

Verification

Is that really ImagesiftBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy ImagesiftBot precisely because site owners allow it. Crawls for images rather than text, so a text-only robots.txt review can miss it entirely.

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