Grapeshot is a bot in the advertising and marketing bots category, operated by Grapeshot.
The Grapeshot bot, part of Oracle Advertising, crawles web pages for content analysis and classification.
Advertising bots review landing pages, check ad placements and classify pages for brand safety and contextual targeting. Blocking ad verification bots can stop your ads or your inventory from serving, so allow the ones your ad partners use.
Sample user agent strings sent by Grapeshot:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GrapeshotCrawler/2.0; +http://www.grapeshot.co.uk/crawler.php)Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12F70 Safari/600.1. 4 (compatible; GrapeshotCrawler/2.0; +http://www.grapeshot.co.uk/crawler.php)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 Grapeshot 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: GrapeshotCrawler Disallow: /
User-agent: GrapeshotCrawler Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: GrapeshotCrawler Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: GrapeshotCrawler Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: GrapeshotCrawler group, Grapeshot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.GrapeshotCrawler from Grapeshot's user agent; check Grapeshot'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.
Ad verification and contextual crawlers like Grapeshot can decide whether your pages get demand. Blocking the ones your partners use can lower fill rates.
Transfon Security for publishersGrapeshot checks pages for ad platforms. Its visits to landing pages are not users, so exclude them from conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersAd platforms send crawlers like Grapeshot to check product landing pages. Keep it allowed so ads are not disapproved, and out of analytics.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow Grapeshot on landing pages linked from your ads, and keep it off the app.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows Grapeshot 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
Grapeshot is a bot in the advertising and marketing bots category, operated by Grapeshot. The Grapeshot bot, part of Oracle Advertising, crawles web pages for content analysis and classification.
We have not confirmed whether Grapeshot 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: GrapeshotCrawler" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "GrapeshotCrawler" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so Grapeshot may not follow it, and anyone can send Grapeshot's user agent, so a fake Grapeshot ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Advertising bots review landing pages, check ad placements and classify pages for brand safety and contextual targeting. Blocking ad verification bots can stop your ads or your inventory from serving, so allow the ones your ad partners use.
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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