aiHitBot

What is aiHitBot?

aiHitBot is an intelligence-gathering web crawler operated by aiHit, a company that collects and processes business information from websites. It functions as a general-purpose crawler that systematically visits and indexes web pages to gather data for aiHit's business intelligence services. Despite its name containing "AI," it's not currently known to leverage artificial intelligence in its operations.

When crawling websites, aiHitBot identifies itself in server logs with the user agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; aiHitBot/2.9; +https://www.aihitdata.com/about). This format follows standard crawler identification practices by including version information and a reference URL where website administrators can learn more about the bot's purpose.

aiHitBot is designed as a lightweight crawler that doesn't process JavaScript, CSS, cookies, or other interactive elements of websites. It primarily focuses on extracting structured text data from static HTML content, making it less resource-intensive than full browser-based crawlers.

Why is aiHitBot crawling my site?

aiHitBot is likely visiting your site to collect business-related information that may be valuable to aiHit's clients. If your website contains company information, product details, contact information, or other business data, aiHitBot may be systematically cataloging this content.

The frequency of visits depends on how relevant your content is to aiHit's data collection priorities. Websites with frequently updated business information may experience more regular visits. The crawler operates continuously as part of aiHit's ongoing data collection efforts.

This crawling is generally considered authorized under the implied license to crawl that exists for publicly accessible websites, provided the crawler respects your robots.txt directives and doesn't impose an unreasonable load on your servers.

What is the purpose of aiHitBot?

aiHitBot serves as the data collection mechanism for aiHit's business intelligence services. The primary purpose is to gather, organize, and process business information from across the web to provide insights to aiHit's clients.

The collected data likely supports services related to business research, competitive intelligence, market analysis, and lead generation. For instance, clients might use aiHit's services to identify potential business partners, analyze competitors, or understand market trends based on the aggregated web data.

For website owners, there's no direct benefit from aiHitBot's crawling activity. However, having your business information included in aiHit's database might potentially increase your visibility to their clients who are looking for companies in your sector.

How do I block aiHitBot?

aiHitBot is designed to respect the robots.txt protocol, making it relatively straightforward to control its access to your website. If you wish to block it completely, you can add the following directives to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: aiHitBot
Disallow: /

This configuration instructs aiHitBot not to crawl any part of your website. If you want to allow it to access certain areas while restricting others, you can be more specific with your directives:

User-agent: aiHitBot
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /members/
Allow: /

The above example would block aiHitBot from the "/private/" and "/members/" directories while allowing access to the rest of the site.

Before deciding to block aiHitBot, consider whether there's any potential value in having your business information included in aiHit's database. Blocking the bot will remove your business from their data collection, which could reduce your visibility to their clients. However, if you're concerned about server resources or prefer not to have your content indexed by business intelligence services, blocking is a reasonable approach.

To verify whether aiHitBot is respecting your robots.txt directives, you can monitor your server logs for continued access attempts after implementing the restrictions.