Exabot

What Exabot does

Exabot fed the index of Exalead, a French search engine sometimes billed as a European answer to Google. Dassault Systèmes bought Exalead in 2010 and steered the technology into enterprise search; the public search engine was wound down and the remnants were folded into Dassault's Netvibes unit. Note that some bot lists misattribute Exabot to "Exa" - the operator was Exalead. The reference URL in its user-agent string no longer resolves to working documentation, and compliance details are effectively unverifiable now. Genuine Exabot traffic in modern logs is rare, and stray hits carrying this user-agent may well be imposters.

Why it visits your site

Historically, indexing for Exalead's public search engine; today, any visits are residual or spoofed.

The bigger picture: search engine crawlers

Search crawlers remain the one category with a decades-old, well-understood bargain: they consume crawl budget and return ranked visibility. Everything about them is comparatively mature - published IP ranges, verification methods, granular directives, webmaster consoles. Blocking them is almost always self-harm, which is precisely why they need to be cleanly separated from AI crawlers in your data: a blanket bot block that catches Googlebot costs you your organic channel.

The complication the AI era added is that search indexes now feed AI features too - AI Overviews draw on Google's index, Copilot on Bing's. Operators have answered with control tokens that split AI use from search use of the same crawl. The practical upshot: your lever for AI concerns is usually a token, not a block on the search crawler itself.

Should you block it?

There is no meaningful search audience behind it anymore, so blocking costs you nothing. With no live operator documentation to lean on, a robots.txt rule for Exabot is a reasonable gesture, but a server-level block is the only dependable option if the traffic actually bothers you. For most sites, it is not worth the config line.

Block via robots.txt

Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask Exabot to stay away:

User-agent: Exabot
Disallow: /

Remember that robots.txt is a request, not a lock - compliance is voluntary, and enforcement happens at the server. Viz's AI Control pairs robots.txt rules with server-level 403 responses and then probes your site to verify the block is actually holding.

How to see Exabot traffic on your site

You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every Exabot request, but many managed WordPress hosts don't expose them, and when they do you are grepping text files by hand. A CDN dashboard sees the traffic at the edge, but it lives outside WordPress and speaks in totals, not in your site's terms. And JavaScript analytics - GA4 and friends - will never show it at all, because Exabot doesn't run scripts.

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to Exabot and read exactly which URLs it fetched and when, right inside wp-admin - then watch the same filter after any blocking decision to see whether the visits stopped, slowed, or kept coming.