What is TweetmemeBot?

TweetmemeBot is an intelligence gathering web crawler operated by Meltwater, a media monitoring company. The bot was originally developed by DataSift (later acquired by Meltwater) and is used to collect and analyze content from websites for media monitoring purposes. As a web crawler, TweetmemeBot systematically browses websites to gather information that helps Meltwater's clients track mentions, monitor brand sentiment, and analyze content trends across the web.

When TweetmemeBot visits your site, it identifies itself through user-agent strings such as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; TweetmemeBot/3.0; +http://tweetmeme.com/) or Mozilla/5.0 (TweetmemeBot/4.0; +http://datasift.com/bot.html) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0. These identifiers allow website administrators to recognize and manage the bot's access through server logs.

Unlike some advanced AI crawlers, TweetmemeBot is a traditional web crawler that doesn't employ artificial intelligence for content analysis. Instead, it gathers data that's later processed by Meltwater's analytics systems to provide insights to their clients.

Why is TweetmemeBot crawling my site?

TweetmemeBot crawls websites to collect content that might be relevant to Meltwater's media monitoring services. If you're seeing this bot in your logs, it's likely because your site contains content that's being monitored by one of Meltwater's clients. This could include:

News articles or blog posts mentioning specific brands, products, or topics
Social media content or discussions related to industries being tracked
Content relevant to competitive intelligence or market analysis

The frequency of TweetmemeBot's visits depends on the relevance of your content to Meltwater's monitoring priorities. Sites with frequently updated content related to topics of interest to Meltwater's clients may see more regular visits. The crawler operates as part of Meltwater's legitimate business operations and is considered an authorized bot when it follows standard crawler etiquette.

What is the purpose of TweetmemeBot?

TweetmemeBot serves Meltwater's media intelligence platform by gathering web content that helps their clients track online mentions, analyze sentiment, and monitor brand presence across the internet. The data collected supports services that allow companies to:

Monitor brand mentions across websites
Track industry news and developments
Analyze sentiment around specific topics or companies
Gather competitive intelligence
Measure the impact of PR and marketing campaigns

For website owners, TweetmemeBot's crawling can potentially increase your content's visibility among Meltwater's corporate clients, though this isn't its primary purpose. The bot is part of a commercial service rather than a public search engine, so the benefits to website owners are indirect.

How do I block TweetmemeBot?

TweetmemeBot respects standard robots.txt directives, making it relatively straightforward to control its access to your site. If you wish to block TweetmemeBot completely, you can add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: TweetmemeBot
Disallow: /

If you want to allow the bot to access certain parts of your site while restricting others, you can use more specific directives:

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

Blocking TweetmemeBot would prevent your content from being included in Meltwater's media monitoring services. This might be desirable if you're concerned about server resources or prefer not to have your content monitored by third-party services. However, if you benefit from having your content discovered by brands and organizations that use Meltwater's services, you might want to allow controlled access instead of blocking completely.

You can verify whether TweetmemeBot is respecting your robots.txt rules by continuing to monitor your server logs after implementing the changes. Most legitimate bots, including TweetmemeBot, will honor properly configured robots.txt directives.

TweetmemeBot