What is Hype Machine?
Hype Machine crawls music publications and blogs since 2005 to discover new artist posts and builds curated playlists from this metadata for music listeners and discovery. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Hype Machine |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
Hype Machine follows an algorithmic schedule shaped by your site's popularity, update cadence, and domain authority. It generally spreads requests across recurring crawl passes, throttles itself to limit server load, and respects crawl directives more reliably than most other bots.
Hype Machine's User Agent
| User Agent | Hype Machine/4.0 hypem.com (anthony@hypem.com) |
How To Block Hype Machine With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Hype Machine from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all search engine crawlers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Hype Machine # https://knownagents.com/agents/hype-machine
Disallow: /Global Statistics for Hype Machine
As of August 11, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
0% of top websites block Hype Machine in their robots.txt files.
Overall Search Engine Crawler Traffic
15.8% of all web traffic came from search engine crawlers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Hype Machine?
No, unless you want to remove your pages from that search engine. Hype Machine supplies its index, so blocking it can eliminate your visibility and organic traffic there. Nearly every website should allow this category. Almost none of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Hype Machine.
Does Hype Machine Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. Hype Machine 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 Hype Machine respects it.
Does Hype Machine Access Private Content?
No special access. Hype Machine can reach only content available to anonymous visitors and does not sign in. Make sure sensitive content is not public by mistake.
Why Is Hype Machine Visiting My Website?
Hype Machine is adding new or changed pages to its search index. It may have discovered your site through links, a sitemap, or direct submission.
How Can I Tell if Hype Machine Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Hype Machine 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 "Hype Machine". Look for recurring passes that revisit changed pages and discover new ones. Because Hype Machine does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.