Does iAskBot respect robots.txt?

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

How do I block iAskBot?

Add these user-agent tokens (iAskBot, iaskspider, iaskspider/2.0) 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

Autonomous agents

iAskBot

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

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.

iAskBot is a bot operated by iAsk that browses the web on its own to finish multi-step tasks. iAskBot and the iaskspider tokens belong to iAsk.Ai, a question-answering search engine. 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.

Also seen as iaskspider, iaskspider/2.0. Rules need to cover every token.

iAskBot at a glance

Reference data for the iAskBot crawler
User agent	`iAskBot` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	iAsk
Purpose	Autonomous agents
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	`iAskBotiaskspideriaskspider/2.0`
Operator documentation	None published

iAskBot and the iaskspider tokens belong to iAsk.Ai, a question-answering search engine. It crawls pages so it can quote them in generated answers.

robots.txt

Allow or block iAskBot

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 iAskBot

User-agent: iAskBot
User-agent: iaskspider
User-agent: iaskspider/2.0
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow iAskBot

User-agent: iAskBot
User-agent: iaskspider
User-agent: iaskspider/2.0
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: iAskBot
User-agent: iaskspider
User-agent: iaskspider/2.0
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 iAskBot 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 once

Verification

Is that really iAskBot?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy iAskBot 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.

Related crawlers

ChatGPT AgentOpenAI · Autonomous agents Claude-WebAnthropic · Autonomous agents Google-CloudVertexBotGoogle · Autonomous agents OperatorOpenAI · Autonomous agents AmazonBuyForMeAmazon · Autonomous agents

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