HypeMachine is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Hype Machine.
Since 2005, Hype Machine monitors music publications/blogs for posts about new artists and builds playlists using this metadata for listeners.
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.
HypeMachine identifies itself with this user agent string:
Hype Machine/4.0 hypem.com ([email protected])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 HypeMachine 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: Hype Disallow: /
User-agent: Hype Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Hype Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Hype Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Hype group, HypeMachine ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Hype from HypeMachine's user agent; check Hype Machine'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.
HypeMachine brings search traffic, so keep the real one allowed. Fake HypeMachine 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 HypeMachine allowed, but out of campaign and conversion data.
Transfon Security for advertisersHypeMachine indexes products for search results. Allow it, and block impersonators that use its name to scrape prices.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow HypeMachine 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 HypeMachine 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
HypeMachine is a bot in the search engine crawlers category, operated by Hype Machine. Since 2005, Hype Machine monitors music publications/blogs for posts about new artists and builds playlists using this metadata for listeners.
We have not confirmed whether HypeMachine 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: Hype" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Hype Machine" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so HypeMachine may not follow it, and anyone can send HypeMachine's user agent, so a fake HypeMachine 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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