Internet Archive

Common mistakes with Internet Archive's crawlers

The errors we see most often with Internet Archive's crawlers in the files and firewalls we test:

1. Treating Internet Archive's crawlers as an AI or search crawler. Blocking it has little effect on visibility; decide based on load and what it does with your data.
2. Relying on robots.txt alone when Internet Archive's crawlers is rated caution or aggressive. Back the rule with a server-side block.
3. Blocking Internet Archive's crawlers by IP alone. Ranges change; match the token and verify with logs.

All three hide inside a file that looks correct, so check Internet Archive's crawlers from outside after every change.

Spotting Internet Archive in your logs

robots.txt says what archive.org_bot and ia_archiver may do; your access logs show what they actually did.

Count requests

On a server with standard Nginx or Apache logs, this counts matching requests per day (adjust the log path for your host):

grep -iE "archive\.org_bot|ia_archiver" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $4}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c

And this shows which paths it requested most, which is the quickest way to see whether your Disallow lines are being respected:

grep -iE "archive\.org_bot|ia_archiver" /var/log/nginx/access.log \
  | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20

Check the requests are genuine

Anyone can send these user-agents, so confirm the source before acting on a match:

• archive.org_bot: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where Internet Archive documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable archive.org_bot request with caution. Check it separately from ia_archiver.
• ia_archiver: we hold no published IP list, so use reverse DNS where Internet Archive documents a hostname and treat an unverifiable ia_archiver request with caution. Check it separately from archive.org_bot.

What our own data shows about Internet Archive

Everything below comes from the AI Crawler Check bot database and our two most recent robots.txt scans of the Tranco top 10,000, not from Internet Archive's marketing. It covers 2 Internet Archive tokens in turn.

archive.org_bot in our records

We first recorded archive.org_bot on March 17, 2026. Internet Archive documents it on archive.org, and we recheck that page before each release. No file in our top-10,000 scans names archive.org_bot, so any rule you write for it puts you ahead of almost every large site.

Among the 4 other agents in our database, archive.org_bot sits first by priority (Tier 6), level with Arquivo-web-crawler, ia_archiver, TurnitinBot. 2 of the 4 share its caution rating. Other operators with a crawler that harvests pages for a dataset or data product: FirecrawlAgent (Firecrawl, Tier 2), iaskspider (iAsk, Tier 2), NovaAct (Amazon, Tier 2), CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler (Cloudflare, Tier 3), Amazon Kendra (Amazon, Tier 6). A policy for archive.org_bot is usually a policy for these too.

A decision record for archive.org_bot

Teams that review crawlers once a quarter keep one short entry per token, so anyone can see why a rule exists and when it was last checked. Filled in from our data, the archive.org_bot entry reads:

• Operator and job: Internet Archive; it harvests pages for a dataset or data product.
• Priority and behaviour: Tier 6, rated caution, blocking impact not documented.
• Suggested starting point: Allow by default; revisit if it costs you bandwidth.
• Enforcement: archive.org_bot's operator does not clearly document how it treats robots.txt. Write the archive.org_bot rule anyway, then confirm in your logs that its requests stop.

User-agent: archive.org_bot
Allow: /

Paste the line into the validator with one of your own URLs before it goes live. Revisit the archive.org_bot entry sooner than most: a caution rating means Internet Archive traffic deserves a monthly look at your logs.

ia_archiver in our records

We first recorded ia_archiver on March 17, 2026. We could not find a page where Internet Archive names it, so treat the token as reported rather than documented. ia_archiver is outside our tracked token set, but 262 of 5,583 top-site files already name it, which is enough to show owners treat it as a real crawler.

Among the 4 other agents in our database, ia_archiver sits third by priority (Tier 6), level with archive.org_bot, Arquivo-web-crawler, TurnitinBot. 2 of the 4 share its caution rating. Other operators with a crawler that harvests pages for a dataset or data product: FirecrawlAgent (Firecrawl, Tier 2), iaskspider (iAsk, Tier 2), NovaAct (Amazon, Tier 2), CloudflareBrowserRenderingCrawler (Cloudflare, Tier 3), Amazon Kendra (Amazon, Tier 6). A policy for ia_archiver is usually a policy for these too.

A decision record for ia_archiver

Teams that review crawlers once a quarter keep one short entry per token, so anyone can see why a rule exists and when it was last checked. Filled in from our data, the ia_archiver entry reads:

• Operator and job: Internet Archive; it harvests pages for a dataset or data product.
• Priority and behaviour: Tier 6, rated caution, blocking impact not documented.
• Suggested starting point: Allow by default; revisit if it costs you bandwidth.
• Enforcement: ia_archiver's operator does not clearly document how it treats robots.txt. Write the ia_archiver rule anyway, then confirm in your logs that its requests stop.

User-agent: ia_archiver
Allow: /

Paste the line into the validator with one of your own URLs before it goes live. Revisit the ia_archiver entry sooner than most: a caution rating means Internet Archive traffic deserves a monthly look at your logs.

How top sites treat Internet Archive's crawlers

From our robots.txt study of the Tranco top 10,000 (5,583 valid files, fetched October 20, 2026):

None of the tokens for Internet Archive's crawlers is tracked by name in our study. For scale, 20.1% of top-site files block at least one AI training crawler and 4.3% refuse every unnamed crawler with User-agent: * and Disallow: /, which would catch Internet Archive's crawlers too.

More questions about Internet Archive

Will blocking Internet Archive affect my Google rankings?

Only if one of its tokens is a Google search crawler. None of Internet Archive's tokens are Googlebot, so classic Google rankings are unaffected.

How quickly does a robots.txt change take effect for Internet Archive?

Crawlers cache robots.txt, commonly for up to a day. Expect a change to apply within about 24 hours, and confirm it in your logs.

Can I allow Internet Archive on some sections and block it on others?

Yes. Inside the group for archive.org_bot, add Disallow lines for the paths to keep private and Allow lines for exceptions. The longest matching rule wins.

Does blocking Internet Archive delete content it already collected?

No. robots.txt only controls future visits. For content already collected, check whether Internet Archive offers a removal or opt-out process.

Is a firewall block better than robots.txt for Internet Archive?

A firewall enforces the decision, while robots.txt asks politely. Many operators recommend robots.txt because blocking their IPs can stop them reading your rules at all. Use robots.txt first, and add a firewall rule only if requests continue.