Does Scrapy respect robots.txt?

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

How do I block Scrapy?

Add the Scrapy 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

Training crawlers

Scrapy

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

You cannot, at least not from the request itself. Scrapy is an open source framework, not one operator. The token means somebody ran the default settings; anybody can change it, so seeing it says more about the operator's carelessness than their identity. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.

Scrapy is a bot operated by Zyte that collects pages used to train AI models. "AI and machine learning applications often need large amounts of quality data, and web data extraction is a fast, efficient way to build structured data sets.". 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.

Scrapy at a glance

Reference data for the Scrapy crawler
User agent	`Scrapy` Token only. The operator has not published a full user-agent string, so match on the substring rather than an exact header.
Operator	Zyte
Purpose	Scrapes data for a variety of uses including training AI.
Respects robots.txt	Not documented
Verification method	None published, user agent only Scrapy is an open source framework, not one operator. The token means somebody ran the default settings; anybody can change it, so seeing it says more about the operator's carelessness than their identity. https://www.zyte.com
Crawl pattern	Not published
Robots.txt tokens	`Scrapy`
Operator documentation	None published

"AI and machine learning applications often need large amounts of quality data, and web data extraction is a fast, efficient way to build structured data sets."

robots.txt

Allow or block Scrapy

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 Scrapy

User-agent: Scrapy
Disallow: /

Blocks every path for this crawler only.

Allow Scrapy

User-agent: Scrapy
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: Scrapy
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 Scrapy keeps your pages out of the next training run. It does not remove anything already collected, and it has no effect on how the site ranks in ordinary search.

Block every crawler in the directory at once

Verification

Is that really Scrapy?

A user-agent header is a string the client chooses. Scrapers copy Scrapy precisely because site owners allow it. Scrapy is an open source framework, not one operator. The token means somebody ran the default settings; anybody can change it, so seeing it says more about the operator's carelessness than their identity.

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