How to block Exabot (Exalead)
Exabot is the web crawler historically associated with Exalead, a search engine. Its crawler fetches public pages to build a search index. This page shows the robots.txt token to target, notes the crawler's search-engine origin, and explains why a Disallow steers only compliant fetchers.
What Exabot is
Exabot is the crawler historically associated with Exalead, a search engine that built its own web index. Its crawler fetches public pages to populate that index. Operators who do not want to appear in Exalead's results can disallow the crawler.
Match on the documented Exabot user-agent token rather than a version string. The user agent is self-identifying; confirm the exact token from your logs, since search crawlers sometimes append a version segment.
- robots.txt token: Exabot
- Associated with the Exalead search engine
- Purpose: building a search index
robots.txt rule
To ask Exabot to stay off your site:
User-agent: Exabot Disallow: /
This targets only that token and leaves major search engines unaffected. Because Exabot is a search crawler, a Disallow also keeps the affected pages out of Exalead's results for compliant crawling. robots.txt is honoured by compliant crawlers and is not enforcement.
How it appears in analytics and logs
Requests carrying the Exabot token are search-index crawl events, not human visits. They indicate the Exalead search engine is crawling your public content; classify them as bot traffic.
Diagnostic use case
Keep the Exalead search crawler from indexing your pages if you do not want to appear in that engine, and confirm the rule reached the correct token.
What WebmasterID can help detect
WebmasterID classifies the Exabot crawler server-side as a search bot and shows whether it keeps reaching your pages after a robots.txt rule is added.
Common mistakes
- Guessing the token instead of confirming it from the self-identifying user agent.
- Assuming blocking Exabot affects Google or Bing — each engine has its own token.
- Expecting robots.txt to enforce the block rather than request compliance.
Privacy and accuracy notes
Blocking Exabot uses only the request user-agent token. No visitor identity is involved, and WebmasterID records the crawl as a bot event separate from human analytics.
Related pages
- How to block SeznamBot
SeznamBot is the crawler for Seznam.cz, a major Czech search engine. This page shows how to disallow SeznamBot in robots.txt, when blocking makes sense, and the visibility trade-off for sites that serve a Czech audience.
- How to block coccocbot in robots.txt
coccocbot is the crawler operated by Cốc Cốc, a search engine and browser popular in Vietnam. This page gives the robots.txt rule to disallow the coccocbot token and explains that it matters mainly if your audience includes Vietnamese-market users.
- robots.txt basics: what it does and what it cannot do
robots.txt is a plain-text file at your site root that tells compliant crawlers which paths they may request. This page covers the directives, how user-agent groups are matched, and the limits that trip people up: robots.txt is advisory, it does not hide pages from search, and it is not a security boundary.
- Web crawler reference
How search-engine crawlers identify themselves in logs.
Sources and verification notes
- Exalead / Exabot — crawler informationExabot associated with the Exalead search engine; token matched on the self-identifying user agent.
Last reviewed 2026-06-24. Facts are checked against primary/official sources where available; uncertain specifics are marked “Data not yet verified” rather than guessed.