What is heritrix?
heritrix is an archiver operated by Internet Archive. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when heritrix visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Internet Archive |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | September 14, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
heritrix periodically fetches complete pages rather than checking metadata alone. Visit frequency typically rises with your site's popularity and update cadence.
heritrix's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; heritrix/3.14.2-SNAPSHOT-2026-04-13T06:21:22Z +https://www.image-meta.com) |
How To Block heritrix With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block heritrix from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all archivers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: heritrix # https://knownagents.com/agents/heritrix
Disallow: /Insights for heritrix
As of September 14, 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 Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
8% of top websites block heritrix in their robots.txts.
Overall Archiver Traffic
0.0% of all web traffic came from archivers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by heritrix.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block heritrix?
Rarely. heritrix preserves snapshots of your pages through redesigns, migrations, and broken links. Blocking it prevents future captures but does not remove existing snapshots. To remove those, you must contact the archive directly. For context, 8% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for heritrix.
Does heritrix Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. heritrix is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether heritrix respects it.
Does heritrix Access Private Content?
No. heritrix archives only what an anonymous visitor can see. Anything public at crawl time may remain available in its archive long after you remove it from your site.
How Can I Tell if heritrix Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks heritrix visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "heritrix". Look for a page and its embedded assets being fetched again after a long interval. Because heritrix does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.
Why Is heritrix Visiting My Website?
heritrix is preserving your pages as part of a historical record. It returns periodically so the archive can capture how your content changes over time.