BrightEdge Crawler user agent
Operated by BrightEdge
BrightEdge Crawler is the crawler of the BrightEdge enterprise SEO platform.
The BrightEdge Crawler bot at a glance
- BrightEdge Crawler is operated by BrightEdge and fetches pages to power a specific product feature.
- The robots.txt token for BrightEdge Crawler is BrightEdge Crawler.
- Blocking an SEO tool crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- BrightEdge Crawler robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is BrightEdge Crawler?
BrightEdge Crawler analyzes sites that BrightEdge customers track.
BrightEdge has not published a crawler page.
Should you block BrightEdge Crawler?
Blocking BrightEdge Crawler is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an SEO tool crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | No effect on AI answers. Blocking hides your pages and backlinks from that SEO tool, including from competitors who use it, and breaks your own audits in that tool. |
| Follows robots.txt | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow BrightEdge Crawler
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token BrightEdge Crawler is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop BrightEdge Crawler, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block BrightEdge Crawler
User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow BrightEdge Crawler
User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep BrightEdge Crawler out of private areas only
User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to BrightEdge Crawler
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(BrightEdge Crawler)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to BrightEdge Crawler
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (BrightEdge Crawler) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "BrightEdge Crawler")How to verify real BrightEdge Crawler traffic
BrightEdge publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for BrightEdge Crawler, so the user agent cannot be verified. Anyone can send the same string. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
How to find BrightEdge Crawler in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts BrightEdge Crawler requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "BrightEdge Crawler" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
BrightEdge Crawler user agent string
The full user agent BrightEdge publishes for BrightEdge Crawler. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 ([email protected])BrightEdge Crawler FAQ
BrightEdge Crawler identifies itself with the robots.txt token "BrightEdge Crawler". A typical request header reads: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 ([email protected])
BrightEdge has not documented how BrightEdge Crawler treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
Blocking an SEO tool crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. No effect on AI answers. Blocking hides your pages and backlinks from that SEO tool, including from competitors who use it, and breaks your own audits in that tool.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. BrightEdge publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for BrightEdge Crawler, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "BrightEdge Crawler", for example with: grep -i "BrightEdge Crawler" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Public bot registry. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
