What is Citoid?
citoid is Wikimedia's citation generation service that fetches metadata from URLs, DOIs, and ISBNs to automatically create formatted citations in Wikipedia and other wikis, using Zotero's translation server for accurate bibliographic data. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when Citoid visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Citoid/WMF (mailto:noc@wikimedia.org) |
| Operated By | Wikimedia |
| Source | Official Website |
| Triggered By | Shared link |
| Used for AI Model Training | Not expected |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Not directly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
Why Is Citoid Visiting My Website?
Someone shared a link to your page. Citoid fetched it to build a preview card, and each new share may trigger another request. A spike often means your content is circulating more widely.
Should I Block Citoid?
Usually not. Blocking Citoid may leave shared links without a title or image, making them less inviting to click. If it begins fetching at unexpected volume, try rate limiting before blocking it outright. For context, 6% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Citoid.
Insights for Citoid
As of October 30, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Compliance
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Citoid Traffic
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From Citoid?
Citoid usually makes a single request within seconds of a URL being shared, without crawling further. Traffic rises and falls with sharing activity, so a widely circulated link can produce a sharp burst of fetches.
Does Citoid Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. Citoid is not expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule only communicates your preference. Enforce the block with firewall or server rules, then use Agent Analytics to verify that its requests stop.
Is Citoid Used for AI Model Training?
Not ordinarily. Citoid is not categorized as an AI training scraper or data provider, so AI model training is not its expected purpose.
Does Blocking Citoid Affect AI Search or Citations?
Not directly. Citoid's expected purpose is not to supply an AI search index or retrieve pages for AI-generated answers.
Does Citoid Access Private Content?
No. Citoid has no credentials and should access only the public URL and assets needed for a preview. It does not continue through the rest of your site.
How Can I Verify a Request From Citoid?
Agent Analytics tracks Citoid visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Citoid". Look for a page and its preview assets being requested without follow-up navigation. Because Citoid does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.
How Is Citoid Different From Other Wikimedia Agents?
Wikimedia operates separate agents for different purposes, so each agent should be evaluated and controlled independently.
- ZoteroTranslationServer: ZoteroTranslationServer extracts citation metadata from URLs, DOIs, and ISBNs using Zotero translators to power Wikimedia's Citoid service for automated reference generat…
- ArchiveBot: ArchiveBot is an intelligence gatherer operated by Wikimedia.
- WMF Zotero Translation Server: WMF Zotero Translation Server is an uncategorized agent operated by Wikimedia.