What is IAS crawler?
ias_crawler from Integral Ad Science performs digital ad verification, brand safety monitoring, and fraud detection across digital advertising channels to ensure quality media measurement. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Integral Ad Science |
| 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
IAS crawler usually returns to a small set of pages rather than crawling an entire site. Visits may follow an hourly, daily, or weekly schedule, while websites its clients do not monitor may never encounter it.
IAS crawler's User Agent
| User Agent | IAS Crawler (ias_crawler; http://integralads.com/site-indexing-policy/) |
How To Block IAS crawler With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block IAS crawler from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all intelligence gatherers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: IAS crawler # https://knownagents.com/agents/ias-crawler
Disallow: /Global Statistics for IAS crawler
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 IAS crawler in their robots.txt files.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
3.5% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by IAS crawler.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block IAS crawler?
If you run ads, confirm IAS crawler'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 IAS crawler.
Does IAS crawler Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. IAS crawler 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 IAS crawler respects it.
Does IAS crawler Access Private Content?
No special access. IAS crawler can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.
Why Is IAS crawler Visiting My Website?
A client of Integral Ad Science may be gathering competitive intelligence, measuring advertisements, or evaluating content for brand safety. The pages requested reflect that client's objective.
How Can I Tell if IAS crawler Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks IAS crawler 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 "IAS crawler". Look for repeated requests to the same small group of commercial or ad-supported pages. Because IAS crawler does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.