What is imageSpider?

Block imageSpider if you want more control over whether your work is used for AI training. Allowing it may increase the chance that your brand appears in AI-generated answers, but either choice leaves traditional search rankings unchanged. For context, 9% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for imageSpider.

Yes. imageSpider 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 imageSpider respects it.

Not through legitimate access. imageSpider primarily targets public content, but some training-data scrapers also attempt to collect gated or paywalled pages. If content loads without authentication, assume it can be collected.

Agent Analytics tracks imageSpider visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "imageSpider". Look for high page counts, short gaps between requests, and deep traversal through linked content. Because imageSpider does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.

Your content matched the criteria ByteDance set for a training dataset. imageSpider typically discovers pages through external links, sitemaps, and seed lists rather than because someone selected your site individually.