What is LinkWalker?
LinkWalker is an intelligence gatherer operated by Fortra. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when LinkWalker visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Fortra |
| 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
LinkWalker'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.
LinkWalker's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LinkWalker/3.0; +http://www.seventwentyfour.com) |
How To Block LinkWalker With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block LinkWalker 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: LinkWalker # https://knownagents.com/agents/linkwalker
Disallow: /Insights for LinkWalker
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 LinkWalker in their robots.txts.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
3.3% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block LinkWalker?
Confirm LinkWalker'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, 8% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for LinkWalker.
Does LinkWalker Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. LinkWalker 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 LinkWalker respects it.
Does LinkWalker Access Private Content?
No special access. LinkWalker can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.
How Can I Tell if LinkWalker Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks LinkWalker visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "LinkWalker". Traffic may range from repeated requests to the same pages to broader crawls or one-off fetches. Because LinkWalker does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.
Why Is LinkWalker Visiting My Website?
Fortra 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.