HarkBot is a bot in the AI assistants and agents category, operated by Hark.
Hark is building the most advanced personal intelligence in the world
AI assistants fetch pages on demand when a user asks a chatbot or an agent to read, summarise or act on a URL. Each request is tied to a person, but the visit carries no ad impressions or analytics. Decide per agent whether the value is worth the load.
HarkBot identifies itself with this user agent string:
HarkBot/1.0Anyone 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 HarkBot 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: HarkBot Disallow: /
User-agent: HarkBot Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: HarkBot Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: HarkBot Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: HarkBot group, HarkBot ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.HarkBot from HarkBot's user agent; check Hark'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.
HarkBot reads pages for a person who asked an AI about them. The visit carries no ad impressions, so exclude it from ad requests and decide whether it may read paywalled content.
Transfon Security for publishersAgent visits can click through landing pages and fill in forms. Exclude HarkBot from conversions so campaign optimisation is based on people.
Transfon Security for advertisersAgents like HarkBot can compare prices and may soon place orders. Decide whether agents may reach checkout, and verify them before they do.
Transfon Security for e-commerceHarkBot can sign up, log in and call endpoints on a user's behalf. Rate limit it on sign-up and API routes, where fake trials and abuse start.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows HarkBot 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
HarkBot is a bot in the AI assistants and agents category, operated by Hark. Hark is building the most advanced personal intelligence in the world
We have not confirmed whether HarkBot 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: HarkBot" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "HarkBot" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so HarkBot may not follow it, and anyone can send HarkBot's user agent, so a fake HarkBot ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
AI assistants fetch pages on demand when a user asks a chatbot or an agent to read, summarise or act on a URL. Each request is tied to a person, but the visit carries no ad impressions or analytics. Decide per agent whether the value is worth the load.
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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