What is Known Agent?
Known Agent is a test bot operated by Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors), a service that helps website owners track, control, and optimize for bots and crawlers. This bot is used for development and testing purposes as part of their platform that provides analytics on bot traffic and automatic robots.txt management. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when Known Agent visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Known Agent/1.0; +https://knownagents.com) |
| Operated By | Known Agents |
| Source | Official Website |
| Identity |
Verified
Verified Identification
Requests claiming to be this agent can be authenticated using its published verification method. |
| Triggered By | Scheduled or manual configuration |
| Used for AI Model Training | Not expected |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Not directly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | No |
Why Is Known Agent Visiting My Website?
Someone, most likely on your own team, configured Known Agent to check your site. Uptime monitors, performance testers, and audit tools visit only the sites or endpoints they are told to watch.
Should I Block Known Agent?
Only if no one on your team relies on it. Known Agent may support uptime monitoring, performance tests, or audits. Blocking it without checking first can silently disrupt those workflows. For context, 7% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for Known Agent.
Insights for Known Agent
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
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From Known Agent?
Known Agent's traffic often follows fixed intervals like a cron job. Activity may consist of short recurring checks or occasional intensive bursts, but it usually remains limited to a specific set of pages or endpoints.
Does Known Agent Follow Robots.txt Rules?
No. Known Agent 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 Known Agent Used for AI Model Training?
Not ordinarily. Known Agent is not categorized as an AI training scraper or data provider, so AI model training is not its expected purpose.
Does Blocking Known Agent Affect AI Search or Citations?
Not directly. Known Agent's expected purpose is not to supply an AI search index or retrieve pages for AI-generated answers.
Does Known Agent Access Private Content?
Only when configured with access. A team may grant Known Agent credentials to monitor staging sites or private health endpoints. Without those credentials, it sees only public pages.
How Can I Verify a Request From Known Agent?
Agent Analytics tracks visits from Known Agent and every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper, then authenticates each visit using Known Agent's published verification method. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "Known Agent". Look for repeated checks of the same pages or endpoints at regular intervals. A matching log entry alone is not proof because any bot can claim to be Known Agent.
How Is Known Agent Different From Other Known Agents Agents?
Known Agents operates separate agents for different purposes, so each agent should be evaluated and controlled independently.
- Known Agents Browser: Known Agents Browser is an automated agent operated by Known Agents.