What is magpie-crawler?
magpie-crawler indexes web content and social media posts for Brandwatch's social media monitoring and consumer intelligence platform to analyze brand mentions. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Brandwatch |
| 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
magpie-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.
magpie-crawler's User Agent
| User Agent | magpie-crawler/1.1 (U; Linux amd64; en-GB; +http://www.brandwatch.net) |
How To Block magpie-crawler With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block magpie-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: magpie-crawler # https://knownagents.com/agents/magpie-crawler
Disallow: /Global Statistics for magpie-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
6% of top websites block magpie-crawler in their robots.txt files.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
3.5% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block magpie-crawler?
If you run ads, confirm magpie-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. For context, 6% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for magpie-crawler.
Does magpie-crawler Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. magpie-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 magpie-crawler respects it.
Does magpie-crawler Access Private Content?
No special access. magpie-crawler can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.
Why Is magpie-crawler Visiting My Website?
A client of Brandwatch 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 magpie-crawler Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks magpie-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 "magpie-crawler". Look for repeated requests to the same small group of commercial or ad-supported pages. Because magpie-crawler does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.