ImagesiftBot: what it is and how to block or allow it

What ImagesiftBot does

ImagesiftBot crawls the web for public images, along with their page URL, surrounding text and alt text, to build an index for Hive's image search and web intelligence products.

Does ImagesiftBot follow robots.txt?

Yes. Imagesift says it respects rules addressed to ImagesiftBot, and follows your Googlebot rules when there is no ImagesiftBot rule.

It honors Crawl-delay, so you can slow it down instead of blocking it.

How to block or allow ImagesiftBot

Block it from the whole site:

User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Disallow: /

Keep it out of one folder only:

User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Disallow: /private/

Slow it down instead, with a pause in seconds between requests:

User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Crawl-delay: 10

A crawler that finds a group with its own name follows only that group and ignores User-agent: *. If your * group disallows paths such as /admin/, repeat those lines in the ImagesiftBot group. robots.txt works per host, so add the rules to each subdomain you want covered.

Imagesift also lets site owners opt out by emailing its support.

Test the result with the robots.txt checker, or write a new file with the robots.txt generator.

What blocking ImagesiftBot changes

Your images stop being added to Imagesift's similar-image search index.

Where to see ImagesiftBot visits

Most bots never appear in Google Analytics. Many don't run JavaScript, so the analytics tag never loads, and Google Analytics 4 automatically excludes traffic from known bots and spiders. Your server or CDN logs record every request with its user agent, so search them for the bot's name.

OneLence recognizes ImagesiftBot and keeps it out of your visitor counts. With Premium, bot traffic shows which bots visit your site, how often and what kind they are.