Channel3Bot is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Channel3.
Channel3Bot visits public product pages to index their content, with the aim of driving traffic back to those websites.
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.
Sample user agent strings sent by Channel3Bot:
Channel3/1.0 (+https://trychannel3.com/channel3bot)Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Channel3Bot/1.0; +https://trychannel3.com/channel3bot)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 Channel3Bot 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: channel3bot Disallow: /
User-agent: channel3bot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: channel3bot Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: channel3bot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: channel3bot group, Channel3Bot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.channel3bot from Channel3Bot's user agent; check Channel3'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.
Channel3Bot brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake Channel3Bot 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 Channel3Bot allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersChannel3Bot indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow Channel3Bot 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 Channel3Bot 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
Channel3Bot is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Channel3. Channel3Bot visits public product pages to index their content, with the aim of driving traffic back to those websites.
We have not confirmed whether Channel3Bot 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: channel3bot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "channel3bot" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Channel3Bot may not follow it, and anyone can send Channel3Bot's user agent, so a fake Channel3Bot 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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