Operated by iAsk
iAsk AI is a dual-purpose AI crawler operated by iAsk. It both indexes content for AI search answers and may retrieve pages on demand for user queries. Allowing it can improve your visibility inside iAsk's AI answers.
iAsk AI is a dual-purpose AI crawler operated by iAsk. It both indexes content for AI search answers and may retrieve pages on demand for user queries. Allowing it can improve your visibility inside iAsk's AI answers.
iAsk AI uses the user-agent token iAskBot. You can control it via robots.txt, meta tags (noai), or the emerging llms.txt standard. Robots.txt is voluntary; for hard enforcement, combine it with server-level IP blocking.
User-agent / Disallow: / without any SEO penalty.<code>User-agent: iAskBot</code> — Matching is case-insensitive. Robots.txt is fetched from the root of each subdomain separately.
Understanding iAsk AI's purpose helps you decide whether to allow or block it.
iAskBot. Use this exact string in robots.txt, Nginx, Apache, or Cloudflare firewall rules to target this bot. Matching in robots.txt is case-insensitive. Verify a request genuinely comes from iAsk AI by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP.User-agent / Disallow: / without any SEO penalty./robots.txt file:
User-agent: iAskBot Disallow: /This instructs iAsk AI not to crawl any path on your site. To block only specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g.,
Disallow: /blog/)./robots.txt before crawling, following RFC 9309. For hard enforcement, combine robots.txt with server-level IP or user-agent blocking.iAskBot (case-insensitive: grep -i "iAskBot" /var/log/nginx/access.log). Filter by user-agent in your log analytics tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).