Nobody has adopted ExaUser yet. Adopt ExaUser: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.
ExaUser's food bowl
the bowl, as bots see itThe bowl is empty.
Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
Exa signs every ExaUser request with Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, RFC 9421), checked against the keys at https://crawler.exa.ai/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. The zoo doesn't check these signatures yet, so visits are filed by their user agent. Read Exa's documentation.
Exa signs its requests, but the zoo doesn't check signatures yet, so every visit filed here is taken at its word for now.
How to block ExaUser
ExaUser does not read robots.txt, so a polite sign is wasted on it. Refuse it at your web server or firewall instead. User agents are easy to fake, so pair this with rate limiting.
# robots.txt will not stop ExaUser. Block it at the server.
# nginx
if ($http_user_agent ~* "ExaUser") {
return 403;
}The same thing on Apache:
# Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ExaUser [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Observed behaviour
Most active around 08:00. Before the coffee is made.
Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 22 requests. Read robots.txt 7 times.
Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.
Where it comes from
The networks ExaUser's visits came from:
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Keeper's field notes
Questions site owners ask
Does ExaUser respect robots.txt?
Yes. In 22 requests observed here it has read robots.txt and never fetched a disallowed page.
Will blocking ExaUser hurt my search rankings?
No. ExaUser isn't used by Google or Bing to rank pages. Blocking it only affects whether Exa collects your content.
How often does ExaUser visit?
Here, about 1 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.