What is outbrain?
outbrain is Outbrain's web crawler that analyzes content on publisher websites to understand context and topics for content recommendation and advertising purposes. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Outbrain |
| Source | Official Website |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 31, 2026 |
Do you operate this agent? Contact us to suggest an update.
Category
Expected Behavior
outbrain visits with a specific set of goals. Expect focused, repeated requests to the pages its clients monitor, like pricing, product listings, and announcements, on schedules ranging from hourly to weekly. Sites outside a client's watchlist may never see it at all.
outbrain's User Agent
| User Agent | Mozilla/5.0 (Java) outbrain |
How To Block outbrain With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block outbrain from accessing your entire 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: outbrain # https://knownagents.com/agents/outbrain
Disallow: /Global Insights for outbrain
As of July 31, 2026, this data reflects agent visits measured across thousands of websites using Agent Analytics, combined with daily scans of the world's top 1000 websites and their robots.txt files.
Robots.txt Blocked Percentage
Country of Origin
Robots.txt Blocking Trend
1% of top websites block outbrain in their robots.txt files.
Overall Intelligence Gatherer Traffic
4.5% of all web traffic came from intelligence gatherers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block outbrain?
Decide who benefits. outbrain collects pricing, product, and brand data for its operator's clients, and those clients can include your competitors. Allow it if visibility in market research matters to you. Block it if you would rather not hand competitors structured data about your business. For comparison, 1% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for outbrain.
Does outbrain Follow Robots.txt Rules?
Yes. outbrain is expected to follow robots.txt rules, so a disallow rule is the right first move. Automatic Robots.txt adds and maintains that rule for you, and Agent Analytics confirms outbrain actually follows it.
Does outbrain Access Private Content?
Public business information is the target. Pricing pages, product listings, and announcements are what its clients pay for. outbrain has no special access, but assume everything you publish openly gets collected.
Why Is outbrain Visiting My Website?
A client of Outbrain is monitoring your market, your brand, or you specifically. Expect outbrain's visits to concentrate on pages with business value, like pricing and product pages.
How Can I Tell if outbrain Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks outbrain visits in real time alongside every other known AI agent, crawler, and scraper. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user agent string contains "outbrain". Look for repeated visits to pricing, product, and news pages. Keep in mind that outbrain doesn't publish a verification method, so any client can claim its user agent string and a log match is a hint rather than proof.