Operated by Brandwatch
Brandwatch's crawler monitors the web for brand mentions and consumer insights.
Brandwatch's crawler monitors the web for brand mentions and consumer insights.
Brandwatch is a commercial SEO analytics crawler operated by Brandwatch. It builds backlink graphs, crawls for technical SEO issues, and tracks keyword rankings. The user-agent Brandwatch is well-known and respected in the SEO industry. Blocking it removes your domain from Brandwatch's index, preventing competitors from analysing your backlink profile via their platform. However, other Brandwatch users also lose visibility into links pointing TO your site — weigh this trade-off carefully.
<code>User-agent: Brandwatch</code> — Matching is case-insensitive. Robots.txt is fetched from the root of each subdomain separately.
Brandwatch is verifiable via reverse-DNS lookup on the crawling IP addresses. You can safely allow it unless you have a specific reason to block (e.g., AI training opt-out or SEO tool visibility).Understanding Brandwatch's purpose helps you decide whether to allow or block it.
Brandwatch. This is the exact string you must use in robots.txt, Nginx, Apache, or Cloudflare firewall rules to target this bot. User-agent matching in robots.txt is case-insensitive, but the string must be spelled correctly. You can verify that a request genuinely comes from Brandwatch by performing a reverse-DNS lookup on the source IP — legitimate bots resolve back to their operator's domain.Brandwatch is verifiable via reverse-DNS lookup on the crawling IP addresses. You can safely allow it unless you have a specific reason to block (e.g., AI training opt-out or SEO tool visibility)./robots.txt file:
User-agent: Brandwatch Disallow: /This instructs Brandwatch not to crawl any path on your site. The Disallow: / directive covers the entire domain including subfolders. To only block specific sections, replace / with the path (e.g.,
Disallow: /blog/). Note: robots.txt is publicly readable — any bot or human can inspect it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.Brandwatch (case-insensitive grep: grep -i "Brandwatch" /var/log/nginx/access.log). You can also check Google Search Console → Coverage → Crawl Stats for Googlebot variants. For Brandwatch specifically, filter by user-agent in your log analysis tool (GoAccess, AWStats, etc.).User-agent: Brandwatch Crawl-delay: 10(10 second delay between requests).
Disallow: / you can restrict Brandwatch to specific paths:
User-agent: Brandwatch Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /staging/ Allow: /This allows Brandwatch everywhere except the listed paths. Path matching in robots.txt uses prefix matching —
Disallow: /private/ blocks /private/page.html but NOT /public/private/.