Freespoke is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Freespoke.
Freespoke is a search engine that believes in free speech and shows you all viewpoints.
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.
Freespoke identifies itself with this user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FreespokeCrawler/2.0; +https://crawler.freespoke.com)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 Freespoke 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: FreespokeCrawler Disallow: /
User-agent: FreespokeCrawler Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: FreespokeCrawler Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: FreespokeCrawler Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: FreespokeCrawler group, Freespoke ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.FreespokeCrawler from Freespoke's user agent; check Freespoke'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.
Freespoke brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake Freespoke 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 Freespoke allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersFreespoke indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow Freespoke 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 Freespoke 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
Freespoke is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Freespoke. Freespoke is a search engine that believes in free speech and shows you all viewpoints.
We have not confirmed whether Freespoke 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: FreespokeCrawler" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "crawler.freespoke.com" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Freespoke may not follow it, and anyone can send Freespoke's user agent, so a fake Freespoke 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.
Privacy, security, monetization, and performance insights. A few emails a month, no spam.