What is heritrix?
heritrix is an archiver operated by Internet Archive. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when heritrix visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; heritrix/3.14.0 +http://digitalcampaignsproject.uofsccreate.org/) |
| Operated By | Internet Archive |
| Source | Official Website |
| Triggered By | Automated crawl |
| Used for AI Model Training | Not expected |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Not directly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
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.
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.
How Do I Block heritrix Using 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 October 29, 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
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From heritrix?
heritrix periodically fetches complete pages rather than checking metadata alone. Visit frequency typically rises with your site's popularity and update cadence.
Does heritrix Follow Robots.txt Rules?
heritrix is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the appropriate first step if you want to block it. Automatic Robots.txt can add and maintain that rule, while Agent Analytics lets you verify whether heritrix respects it.
Is heritrix Used for AI Model Training?
Not ordinarily. heritrix is not categorized as an AI training scraper or data provider, so AI model training is not its expected purpose.
Does Blocking heritrix Affect AI Search or Citations?
Not directly. heritrix's expected purpose is not to supply an AI search index or retrieve pages for AI-generated answers.
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 Verify a Request From heritrix?
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.
How Is heritrix Different From Other Internet Archive Agents?
Internet Archive operates separate agents for different purposes, so each agent should be evaluated and controlled independently.
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