RankRaftBot
You are probably here because you saw us in your access log. Here is exactly what we are and what we asked for.
RankRaft AI is an AI-visibility tool. Site owners use it to find out whether AI answer engines can read their site, and whether those engines recommend them. We only ever fetch a site at the request of someone who has added and verified that domain in their own RankRaft AI account.
What you will see in your logs
We send three shapes of User-Agent, all of them linking back to this page.
RankRaftBot/1.0 (+https://rankraft.ai/bot): our own identity, used for ordinary fetches.RankRaftProbe-Unknown/1.0 (+https://rankraft.ai/bot): a crawler nobody has written a rule for. It tells us whether a block is aimed at AI crawlers specifically or at all automated traffic.<BotToken>/1.0 (+https://rankraft.ai/bot) RankRaft-AccessCheck: the access check.
The access check is the one that looks alarming
To tell you whether you are blocking GPTBot, we have to ask your server what it would do if GPTBot knocked. So that third User-Agent begins with the token of the bot being tested. A line reading GPTBot/1.0 (+https://rankraft.ai/bot) RankRaft-AccessCheck in your log is us, not OpenAI.
This is deliberate and we do not hide it. Edge rules match on the bot token as a substring, so the prefix is what makes the test meaningful, while the suffix and this URL make it obvious who actually called. Plain impersonation would buy nothing extra and would be dishonest.
What we request
- Your
/robots.txt, and a small number of requests to a single page you nominate. - Requests are spaced 400 ms apart. We do not crawl your whole site, and we do not follow links.
- We send no cookies, submit no forms and execute no JavaScript. Every request is a plain GET or HEAD.
- An access check runs when a customer asks for one, and on a schedule they control, not continuously.
How to allow us
Nothing is required. If you want to be explicit, RankRaftBot is the token to allow. Note that our access check deliberately identifies as the bot under test, so a rule written against GPTBot will also stop the check, which is the correct result, because that is what we are measuring.
How to block us
Add this to your robots.txt and we will stop:
User-agent: RankRaftBotDisallow: /
We honour it. If you believe we have behaved badly, or you want us to stop immediately rather than at the next crawl, write to abuse@rankraft.ai with a log excerpt and we will look into it.