What is Known Agent?
Known Agent is a test bot operated by Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors), a service that helps website owners track, control, and optimize for bots and crawlers. This bot is used for development and testing purposes as part of their platform that provides analytics on bot traffic and automatic robots.txt management. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Known Agents |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
| Insights Last Updated | August 11, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
Known Agent's traffic often follows fixed intervals like a cron job. Activity may consist of short recurring checks or occasional intensive bursts, but it usually remains limited to a specific set of pages or endpoints.
Known Agent's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Known Agent/1.0; +https://knownagents.com) |
How To Block Known Agent With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to request that Known Agent not access your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to request the same of all developer helpers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Known Agent # https://knownagents.com/agents/known-agent
Disallow: /Global Statistics for Known Agent
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 Known Agent in their robots.txt files.
Overall Developer Helper Traffic
0.3% of all web traffic came from developer helpers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by Known Agent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Known Agent?
Only if no one on your team relies on it. Known Agent may support uptime monitoring, performance tests, or audits. Blocking it without checking first can silently disrupt those workflows. Almost none of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Known Agent.
Does Known Agent Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. Known Agent is not expected to follow robots.txt directives, so a disallow rule only communicates your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then use Agent Analytics to verify that its requests stop.
Does Known Agent Access Private Content?
Only when configured with access. A team may grant Known Agent credentials to monitor staging sites or private health endpoints. Without those credentials, it sees only public pages.
Why Is Known Agent Visiting My Website?
Someone, most likely on your own team, configured Known Agent to check your site. Uptime monitors, performance testers, and audit tools visit only the sites or endpoints they are told to watch.
How Can I Tell if Known Agent Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from Known Agent and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using Known Agent's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Known Agent". Look for repeated checks of the same pages or endpoints at regular intervals. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be Known Agent.