Should you block ImagesiftBot? ImageSift's image crawler
ImagesiftBot is operated by ImageSift (Hive). It collects publicly available images, with their page text and alt text, for ImageSift's web intelligence products, which search for similar images.
Who should block ImagesiftBot, and who should not?
The case for blocking it is image reuse: its index exists so ImageSift's customers can find where similar images appear, and ImageSift documents no way it sends visitors back. Check the Googlebot inheritance before you decide: with a Googlebot group and no ImagesiftBot group, it takes Googlebot's permissions, which are usually generous. Name it explicitly to block it, or set a Crawl-delay if load is the only concern.
The verified facts
| User-agent token | ImagesiftBot |
|---|---|
| Full user agent in logs | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ImagesiftBot; +imagesift.com) |
| Operator | ImageSift (Hive) |
| Purpose | Other product crawlers |
| Honors robots.txt | Yes, per the operator's documentation. |
| Verification | No IP list or reverse-DNS method published |
What does ImageSift (Hive)’s documentation add?
- Along with images, it saves the host URL, the text on the page, and the image alt text, and indexes them so ImageSift's products can find similar images.
- It honors Crawl-delay as the minimum gap between the start of requests: with Crawl-delay: 5 it makes at most one request in each 5-second slot.
- If no rule names ImagesiftBot but one names Googlebot, it follows the Googlebot rules. ImageSift takes opt-out requests at support@imagesift.com.
How do you block ImagesiftBot?
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Disallow: /Once you give a crawler its own group, it stops reading your User-agent: * rules, so run the whole file through the AI crawler robots.txt tester before you deploy it.
What does blocking ImagesiftBot cost you?
Your images and their page text drop out of ImageSift's similar-image index.
Which crawlers in the same group should you decide on at the same time?
A robots.txt group for ImagesiftBot does nothing to crawlers with other tokens. In the same group, the directory also covers OAI-AdsBot (OpenAI), GoogleOther (Google), FacebookExternalHit (Meta), Meta-ExternalAds (Meta) and Amazonbot (Amazon), each with its own token and its own documented cost of blocking.