What is SmarshBot?
SmarshBot is an archiving bot operated by Smarsh that crawls and captures web content for compliance management and regulatory recordkeeping purposes. Organizations use this service to maintain archives of web pages and online communications to meet legal and regulatory requirements. Agent Analytics can track when it visits your website.
Overview
| Operated By | Smarsh |
| Expected To Follow Robots.txt | Yes |
| Insights Last Updated | July 9, 2026 |
Category
Expected Behavior
SmarshBot returns on a cadence to capture full snapshots of your pages for the historical record. Expect complete page fetches rather than metadata checks, at a frequency that rises with your site's popularity and how often your content changes.
SmarshBot's User Agent
| User Agent | SmarshBot/1.0 |
How To Block SmarshBot With Robots.txt
Add this rule to your robots.txt file to block SmarshBot from accessing your entire website, or use Automatic Robots.txt to block all archivers at once. You can customize which pages are blocked by swapping out / for a different path.
User-agent: SmarshBot # https://knownagents.com/agents/smarshbot
Disallow: /SmarshBot Global Insights
As of July 9, 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 SmarshBot in their robots.txt files.
Overall Archiver Traffic
0.1% of all web traffic came from archivers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Block SmarshBot?
Almost never. SmarshBot preserves snapshots of your pages so the record survives redesigns, migrations, and dead links. Blocking only stops new captures. Snapshots that already exist stay public until you ask the archive itself to remove them. For comparison, 1% of the top websites we track already have robots.txt rules for SmarshBot.
Does SmarshBot Respect Robots.txt?
Yes. SmarshBot is expected to honor 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 SmarshBot actually honors it.
Does SmarshBot Access Private Content?
It archives only what any anonymous visitor can see. Anything public at crawl time can stay retrievable in SmarshBot's archive long after you take it down.
Why Is SmarshBot Visiting My Website?
SmarshBot is preserving your pages as part of the historical record. Visits recur on a schedule so the archive can capture how your content changes over time.
How Can I Tell if SmarshBot Is Visiting My Website?
Agent Analytics tracks SmarshBot 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 "SmarshBot". Look for periodic full page captures that recur on a schedule. Keep in mind that SmarshBot 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.