AllAfricaCrawler is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by AllAfrica Global Media.
AllAfrica Global Media produces, aggregates and distributes news from across Africa, relying on agreements with more than 140 news organizations and over 500 other institutions and individuals. The AllAfrica NewsBot scrapes content from sites with whom AllAfrica has written agreements, or whose content is available without licensing restrictions or otherwise freely distributable. In all cases, the author and institution is credited in full.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
AllAfricaCrawler identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AllAfrica NewsBot/1.0)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
We have not confirmed whether AllAfricaCrawler follows robots.txt. Add a rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: AllAfrica Disallow: /
User-agent: AllAfrica Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: AllAfrica Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: AllAfrica Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: AllAfrica group, AllAfricaCrawler ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.AllAfrica from AllAfricaCrawler's user agent; check AllAfrica Global Media's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
AllAfricaCrawler brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake AllAfricaCrawler requests are a common cover for scrapers, so verify it by network rather than by name.
Transfon Security for publishersSearch crawlers fetch landing pages to check them. Keep AllAfricaCrawler allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersAllAfricaCrawler indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow AllAfricaCrawler on marketing and docs pages, and keep it off signed-in app pages it cannot use.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows AllAfricaCrawler by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
AllAfricaCrawler is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by AllAfrica Global Media. AllAfrica Global Media produces, aggregates and distributes news from across Africa, relying on agreements with more than 140 news organizations and over 500 other institutions and individuals. The AllAfrica NewsBot scrapes content from sites with whom AllAfrica has written agreements, or whose content is available without licensing restrictions or otherwise freely distributable. In all cases, the author and institution is credited in full.
We have not confirmed whether AllAfricaCrawler follows robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped, and block it by user agent if it did not.
Add "User-agent: AllAfrica" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "AllAfrica" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so AllAfricaCrawler may not follow it, and anyone can send AllAfricaCrawler's user agent, so a fake AllAfricaCrawler ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Search engine crawlers index your pages so they can appear in search results. Keep the genuine ones allowed and verify them, because fake search crawlers are one of the most common disguises for scrapers.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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