What is virustotal?

Confirm virustotal'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, 6% of the top websites we track currently have robots.txt rules for virustotal.

Yes. virustotal 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 virustotal respects it.

No special access. virustotal can read publicly available pages but cannot bypass authentication. Assume anything you publish openly may be collected.

Agent Analytics tracks virustotal visits in real time. You can also check your server logs for requests whose user-agent string contains "virustotal". Traffic may range from repeated requests to the same pages to broader crawls or one-off fetches. Because virustotal does not publish a verification method, any client can claim its identity and a log match is only a clue.

VirusTotal 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.