Bots
ImagesiftBot: should you allow it?
ImagesiftBot is the crawler behind ImageSift, a Hive product. It collects publicly available images with their page text and alt text for an image-search index. It is not an AI answer engine, so blocking it costs no AI visibility. It honours robots.txt and crawl-delay, and follows your Googlebot rules when nothing names it.
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0requests filed as ImagesiftBot · 30 days
of 143,601 AI crawler requests from 7 operators
| Agent | AI requests, 30 days | attensira.com robots.txt |
|---|---|---|
| ImagesiftBot (this page) | 0 | Wildcard |
| Google-CloudVertexBot | 0 | Parent's rule |
None of the 2 had a request filed in the window. User agents as sent, not checked against address lists.
Analyst · reads the AI traffic boardAI traffic board, read over the Attensira MCP, and our live robots.txt · · n=143,601 AI requests
Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa, Founder & CEOLast updated How do I allow or block ImagesiftBot in robots.txt?
Paste this into the robots.txt at the root of your domain. Beside it, the group attensira.com serves ImagesiftBot today.
# Keep your images out of ImageSift's index.User-Agent: ImagesiftBotDisallow: /# To slow it instead of blocking it (ImageSift documents# crawl-delay support), replace the Disallow line with:# Crawl-delay: 5# No group names ImagesiftBot, so it reads the wildcard# group.User-agent: *Allow: /Disallow: /api/We do not name ImagesiftBot. It falls through to the wildcard group, which allows everything except /api/.
Read the whole file, or write yours with the robots.txt generator.
Who runs ImagesiftBot, and what is it for?
Hive runs it, and we file it under product operations. Collects images with their page text for ImageSift's image-search index. It is not an AI answer engine, so whether you are cited does not depend on it.
From Hive’s documentation, read .
Why is ImagesiftBot filed under product operations?
The taxonomy in the AI crawler guide sorts an agent by what its fetch ends in. A search crawl ends in a result that links back to you; a training crawl ends in model weights. ImageSift documents neither. It says the fetch ends in an index its own products query for similar images, with the host URL, page text and alt text stored beside each image.6
That is a crawl serving somebody else's product. Calling it a training crawler goes beyond what the operator publishes, and so does ruling that out. What ImageSift does say is enough for the decision: allowing or blocking it is not a visibility tactic in either direction.
Why does my Googlebot group decide what ImagesiftBot sees?
ImageSift states that where no rule targets ImagesiftBot but one targets Googlebot, it follows the Googlebot directives. A site that opened an image directory to Googlebot so those images would appear in Google Images has opened the same directory to this crawler, for a different purpose.
The fallback is read before your wildcard group, so User-agent: * cannot override it, and a wildcard broad enough to try would also catch search crawlers that have no group of their own. Kagibot documents the same fallback, so check for it on other crawlers too. See the robots.txt chapter.
How do I verify that a visit really came from ImagesiftBot?
You cannot. ImageSift publishes no IP range file and no reverse-DNS suffix; its page offers only an email address for questions or opt-out requests. The user-agent header is free text any client can send, so nothing confirms a request is really ImagesiftBot.
Count this traffic as claimed, and keep it out of any column that sits beside operators such as OpenAI and Google, which do publish a verification path. The method for crawlers that can be checked is in verifying a crawler.
Hive publishes no reverse-DNS suffix and no IP range file for ImagesiftBot, so a visit can be matched only by its user agent.
ResearcherTranscribed from Hive documentation · What user-agent string does ImagesiftBot send?
Match the token, never the version. A rule pinned to a version stops matching silently the next time the operator ships.
The version in this string changes; check Hive’s page before relying on the exact text.
What does allowing ImagesiftBot cost?
Allowing it costs crawl load on your image URLs and puts your images, with their page text and alt text, into ImageSift's image-search index. Blocking it gives up nothing in AI answers. Without a group that names it, it follows your Googlebot rules, so an allow you never wrote may already be in force.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ImagesiftBot; +imagesift.com)Should I allow ImagesiftBot in my situation?
Concrete cases, and what each one implies for this agent.
You want your images out of an image-similarity index without touching your search presence.
Write an ImagesiftBot group; do not reach for a wildcard.
ImageSift documents a fallback to Googlebot directives where no ImagesiftBot rule exists, so the only way to diverge from your search rules is an explicit group. A wildcard aimed at this crawler would also catch every search crawler that has no group of its own, which is the opposite of the intent.
The crawl is fetching images faster than your origin likes and you would rather slow it than block it.
Add a Crawl-delay to the ImagesiftBot group.
ImageSift documents support for crawl-delay and states it interprets the value as the minimum duration in seconds between the start of consecutive requests, splitting each day into intervals of that length and issuing at most one request per interval. Crawl-delay is not part of RFC 9309 and most crawlers ignore it, so this is worth using precisely because the operator says it works here.
You want to count verified ImagesiftBot traffic the way you count verified GPTBot traffic.
Record it as claimed, not verified, and say so in the report.
ImageSift publishes neither an IP range file nor a reverse-DNS suffix, so no request claiming this identity can be confirmed. Reporting it in the same column as operators that do publish a verification path would present a guess and a fact in the same units.
What else do people ask?
Does ImagesiftBot honour crawl-delay?
What does it store from my pages?
Does ImagesiftBot respect robots.txt?
Where do these facts come from?
7 claims on this page, each with the page it was read from; last checked . The numbers in the text point here.
ImageSift documents ImageSiftBot as a web crawler that scrapes the internet for publicly available images to support its suite of web intelligence products.
imagesift.com · retrieved
“web crawler that scrapes the internet for publicly available images to support our suite of web intelligence products”
ImageSift documents that requests from ImageSiftBot set the User-Agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ImagesiftBot; +imagesift.com)".
imagesift.com · retrieved · changes often, check the source
“Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ImagesiftBot; +imagesift.com)”
ImageSift states that standard directives in robots.txt that target ImagesiftBot are respected.
imagesift.com · retrieved
“Standard directives in robots.txt that target ImagesiftBot are respected.”
ImageSift states that if there is no rule targeting ImagesiftBot, but there is a rule targeting Googlebot, then ImagesiftBot will follow the Googlebot directives.
imagesift.com · retrieved
“If there is no rule targeting ImagesiftBot, but there is a rule targeting Googlebot, then ImagesiftBot will follow the Googlebot directives.”
ImageSift states that ImagesiftBot supports the crawl-delay directive, interpreting the value as the minimum duration in seconds between the start of consecutive requests, and that it splits each day into intervals of that length and issues at most one request to a domain inside each interval.
imagesift.com · retrieved
“It interprets the value as the minimum duration, in seconds, between the start of consecutive requests.”
ImageSift states that along with images ImageSiftBot saves the host URL and text on the page and the alt text associated with the image, and that it analyses the downloaded data and stores the information in an index its web intelligence products use to enable search and retrieval of similar images.
imagesift.com · retrieved
“Our web intelligence products use this index to enable search and retrieval of similar images.”
ImageSift's crawler page publishes no IP ranges and no reverse-DNS suffix for ImagesiftBot, offering only an email address for questions or opt-out requests.
imagesift.com · retrieved
“please contact us by email at support@imagesift.com”
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