ImagesiftBot
ImagesiftBot is blocked by 532 sites in the October 2026 survey, or 8.6% of readable files. The community reference lists its operator as ImageSift.
Who runs ImagesiftBot?
| Fact | ImagesiftBot reference entry |
|---|---|
| Operator | “ImageSift” |
| Purpose | “ImageSiftBot is a web crawler that scrapes the internet for publicly available images to support their suite of web intelligence products” |
| Does ImagesiftBot obey robots.txt? | “Yes” |
| Frequency | “No information.” |
| Cloudflare managed list for ImagesiftBot | No |
These facts quote the stored community ai.robots.txt reference.
“Once images and text are downloaded from a webpage, ImageSift analyzes this data from the page and stores the information in an index. Their web intelligence products use this index to enable search and retrieval of similar images.”
This entry’s stated use is quoted above. Keeping a site available to readers may include allowing search and requested fetches. An owner may still keep the text out of training collections.
How many sites block it?
Instructions to stay out of the whole site appear in 532 files, or 8.6% of 6,171 readable files. We counted 332 with its name in a User-agent line, a 5.4% share. Another 5,639 lack a recorded Disallow: / ban.
Breaking out the leading 1,000 sites gives 552 readable files, with 57 naming the crawler, or 10.3%. Whole-site blocking appears in 92 of them. Blocking is more common among the leading sites, at 16.7%. Beyond those ranks, 5,619 files have a blocking total of 440, 7.8% of that sample.
| Readable files | Named by | Named share | Blocked by | Blocked share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ImagesiftBot, all ranks | 332 | 5.4% | 532 | 8.6% |
| ImagesiftBot, top 1,000 | 57 | 10.3% | 92 | 16.7% |
| ImagesiftBot, remaining ranks | 275 | 4.9% | 440 | 7.8% |
Rules for every crawler, written User-agent: *, count here too. Of 532 blocks, 228 come only from that general rule, without naming this crawler. The split among files that name it is 304 with a whole-site block and 28 without one. Its name is absent from 5,839 readable files. We ignore capitalization and repeated names.
Has that changed since August?
Between August and October, 17 sites that had blocked it stopped and 29 started, so 12 more of the same 5,889 sites block it. A further 465 blocked it in both months, and 5,378 did so in neither. Keeping the sites the same lets us count changes in their rules.
August’s full sample had 510 blocks among 6,236 readable files. October’s was 532 among 6,171. Those monthly totals also reflect which files we could read on each visit.
| August to October | Files |
|---|---|
| Started blocking | 29 |
| Stopped blocking | 17 |
| Blocked in both | 465 |
| Blocked in neither | 5,378 |
| Net change | +12 |
How to block or allow it
These lines go in robots.txt at the root. User-agent: * yields to a group naming ImagesiftBot under the robots.txt standard.
Block the whole site
User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Disallow: /Allow access
User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Allow: /It's the 26th most-named crawler of the 171 we counted in the crawler index.
How we counted
For ImagesiftBot, the survey covered 10,000 top Tranco sites, collected on 19 October 2026. Files had an 8-second timeout and a 262,144-byte limit. Only available files we could read enter the percentages. Parsing includes files read again, through scripts/robots_2026_08_06.py (robots.py at app commit 07104ff). See the full survey method.
Common questions
Can a file name it and still allow it?
We found 28 files without a whole-site ban among 332 that name it.
How do the shares compare by rank?
Leading files record 10.3% with the name and 16.7% blocking it. Across all readable files, the corresponding shares are 5.4% and 8.6%.
What other entry is close in the index?
For comparison, DuckAssistBot has 320 files naming it and 237 blocks, or 3.8%. Our counts for this entry are 332 files with the name and 532 blocking the whole site, or 8.6%.