What is Owler?
Owler is a business intelligence bot that gathers competitive intelligence and company information data. It crawls websites to collect publicly available information about businesses for Owler's company database and competitive insights platform. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Owler |
| 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
Owler 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.
Owler's User Agent
| User Agent | OWLer |
How To Block Owler With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Owler 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: Owler # https://knownagents.com/agents/owler
Disallow: /
Global Statistics for Owler
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 Owler 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 Owler.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Owler?
If you run ads, confirm Owler'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 Owler.
Does Owler Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. Owler 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 Owler respects it.
Does Owler Access Private Content?
No special access. Owler can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.
Why Is Owler Visiting My Website?
A client of Owler 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 Owler Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Owler 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 "Owler". Look for repeated requests to the same small group of commercial or ad-supported pages. Because Owler does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.