What is outbrain?

If you run ads, confirm outbrain'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, 1% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for outbrain.

Yes. outbrain 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 outbrain respects it.

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

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

Agent Analytics tracks outbrain 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 "outbrain". Look for repeated requests to the same small group of commercial or ad-supported pages. Because outbrain does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.