What is IAS crawler?
ias_crawler from Integral Ad Science performs digital ad verification, brand safety monitoring, and fraud detection across digital advertising channels to ensure quality media measurement. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when IAS crawler visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Integral Ad Science |
| 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
IAS crawler's traffic pattern depends on the intelligence being collected. It may revisit specific pages on a schedule, crawl broader sections of your site, or appear only when information is requested. Its request scope and frequency reflect the underlying objective.
IAS crawler's User Agent
| User Agent | IAS Crawler (ias_crawler; http://integralads.com/site-indexing-policy/) |
How To Block IAS crawler With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block IAS crawler from accessing your website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all intelligence gatherers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: IAS crawler # https://knownagents.com/agents/ias-crawler
Disallow: /Insights for IAS crawler
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
6% of top websites block IAS crawler in their robots.txts.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
3.3% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
Top Visited Website Categories
The types of websites most frequently visited by IAS crawler.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block IAS crawler?
Confirm IAS crawler's purpose before blocking it. Intelligence gatherers may collect competitive research, measure advertisements, or evaluate pages for brand safety. Weigh any benefit against sharing business or page-level data with its operator or clients. For context, 6% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for IAS crawler.
Does IAS crawler Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. IAS crawler 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 IAS crawler respects it.
Does IAS crawler Access Private Content?
No special access. IAS crawler can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.
How Can I Tell if IAS crawler Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks IAS crawler visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "IAS crawler". Traffic may range from repeated requests to the same pages to broader crawls or one-off fetches. Because IAS crawler does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.
Why Is IAS crawler Visiting My Website?
Integral Ad Science or one of its clients may be gathering competitive intelligence, measuring advertisements, or evaluating content for brand safety. The pages requested reflect the underlying objective.