What is AffsignalCrawler?

If you run ads, confirm AffsignalCrawler's purpose before blocking it. Some intelligence gatherers measure ad placements or evaluate pages for brand safety, and blocking those agents can interfere with advertising systems. If this one serves a different purpose, weigh any research visibility against sharing business or page-level data with third parties. Almost none of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for AffsignalCrawler.

Yes. AffsignalCrawler is expected to follow robots.txt directives, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether AffsignalCrawler respects it.

No special access. AffsignalCrawler can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.

A client of Affsignal may be gathering competitive intelligence, measuring advertisements, or evaluating content for brand safety. The pages requested reflect that client's objective.

Agent Analytics tracks AffsignalCrawler visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "AffsignalCrawler". Look for repeated requests to the same small group of commercial or ad-supported pages. Because AffsignalCrawler does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.