Brandwatch is a bot in the AI crawlers category, operated by Brandwatch.
The Magpie Crawler indexes content for its soical media monitoring solution.
AI crawlers collect web pages in bulk to build training data for large language models and other AI systems. They take content without sending visitors back. Most publishers block them in robots.txt or at the WAF unless they have a licensing deal with the operator.
Brandwatch identifies itself with this user agent string:
magpie-crawler/1.1 (U; Linux amd64; en-GB; +http://www.brandwatch.net)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 Brandwatch 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: magpie-crawler Disallow: /
User-agent: magpie-crawler Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: magpie-crawler Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: magpie-crawler Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: magpie-crawler group, Brandwatch ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.magpie-crawler from Brandwatch's user agent; check Brandwatch'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.
Brandwatch takes articles for AI training without sending readers back, and its page loads count as invalid traffic if your ad tags fire. Decide whether to license, limit or block it, and keep it out of ad requests.
Transfon Security for publishersVisits from Brandwatch to your landing pages are not people. Keep them out of conversion, retargeting and audience data so you do not pay to reach a crawler.
Transfon Security for advertisersBrandwatch can copy product descriptions, prices and reviews in bulk. Allow it on pages you want AI models to know about and block it on search, cart and account pages.
Transfon Security for e-commerceBrandwatch can fetch documentation and public app pages at scale. Rate limit it so it does not slow the product for paying users.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Brandwatch 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
Brandwatch is a bot in the AI crawlers category, operated by Brandwatch. The Magpie Crawler indexes content for its soical media monitoring solution.
We have not confirmed whether Brandwatch 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: magpie-crawler" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "magpie-crawler" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Brandwatch may not follow it, and anyone can send Brandwatch's user agent, so a fake Brandwatch ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
AI crawlers collect web pages in bulk to build training data for large language models and other AI systems. They take content without sending visitors back. Most publishers block them in robots.txt or at the WAF unless they have a licensing deal with the operator.
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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