What is magpie-crawler?
magpie-crawler indexes web content and social media posts for Brandwatch's social media monitoring and consumer intelligence platform to analyze brand mentions. You can set up Agent Analytics to see when magpie-crawler visits your website.
Category
| Example User Agent | magpie-crawler |
| Operated By | Brandwatch |
| Source | Official Website |
| Triggered By | Operator-configured crawl |
| Used for AI Model Training | Possibly |
| Affects AI Chat & Search Visibility | Not directly |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
Why Is magpie-crawler Visiting My Website?
Brandwatch 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.
Should I Block magpie-crawler?
Confirm magpie-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, 13% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for magpie-crawler.
How Do I Block magpie-crawler Using Robots.txt?
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block magpie-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: magpie-crawler # https://knownagents.com/agents/magpie-crawler
Disallow: /Insights for magpie-crawler
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
magpie-crawler Traffic
Frequently Asked Questions
What Traffic Patterns Should I Expect From magpie-crawler?
magpie-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.
Does magpie-crawler Follow Robots.txt Rules?
magpie-crawler 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 magpie-crawler respects it.
Is magpie-crawler Used for AI Model Training?
Possibly, but its category does not establish that purpose. magpie-crawler's operator may use or provide the collected content for AI training or for unrelated automated tasks.
Does Blocking magpie-crawler Affect AI Search or Citations?
Not directly. magpie-crawler's expected purpose is not to supply an AI search index or retrieve pages for AI-generated answers.
Does magpie-crawler Access Private Content?
No special access. magpie-crawler can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.
How Can I Verify a Request From magpie-crawler?
Agent Analytics tracks magpie-crawler visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "magpie-crawler". Traffic may range from repeated requests to the same pages to broader crawls or one-off fetches. Because magpie-crawler does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.