What is Spider?
Spider is a web crawler designed for AI projects, including AI agents, LLMs, RAG systems, and data analysis. It collects and converts web data into multiple formats including markdown, HTML, and text for AI training and fine-tuning purposes. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Spider |
| 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
Spider tends to make broad, high-volume sweeps that fetch far more pages per visit than a search crawler. Timing is unpredictable: traffic may remain heavy throughout a collection pass, then stop entirely.
How To Block Spider With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block Spider from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all AI data scrapers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: Spider # https://knownagents.com/agents/spider
Disallow: /Global Statistics for Spider
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
2% of top websites block Spider in their robots.txt files.
Overall AI Data Scraper Traffic
1.2% of all web traffic came from AI data scrapers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block Spider?
Block Spider if you want more control over whether your work is used for AI training. Allowing it may increase the chance that your brand appears in AI-generated answers, but either choice leaves traditional search rankings unchanged. For context, 2% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Spider.
Does Spider Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. Spider 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 Spider respects it.
Does Spider Access Private Content?
Not through legitimate access. Spider primarily targets public content, but some training-data scrapers also attempt to collect gated or paywalled pages. If content loads without authentication, assume it can be collected.
Why Is Spider Visiting My Website?
Your content matched the criteria Spider set for a training dataset. Spider typically discovers pages through external links, sitemaps, and seed lists rather than because someone selected your site individually.
How Can I Tell if Spider Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks Spider 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 "Spider". Look for high page counts, short gaps between requests, and deep traversal through linked content. Because Spider does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.