FriendlyCrawler
An anonymous crawler that describes itself as gathering data for machine learning experiments; nobody has ever claimed it.
FriendlyCrawler/1.0See what FriendlyCrawler sees on your site → try Peekabot, free
What FriendlyCrawler does
FriendlyCrawler runs from AWS infrastructure and self-describes as collecting data for machine learning experiments - but no company or person has claimed it, and there is no documentation, no contact, and no published policy. Reports on its robots.txt behavior conflict: some trackers list it as compliant, while site owners have reported it crawling straight through disallow rules from rotating IP addresses.
Why it visits your site
Someone's machine learning experiment wants your text. Who, and for what, is anyone's guess.
The bigger picture: AI training crawlers
Training crawlers are the most economically lopsided visitors your server has. A search crawler takes your content and pays you back in ranked listings and click-throughs; a training crawler takes the same content to improve a commercial model and, by design, sends nothing in return. The visit itself is the entire transaction. That asymmetry is why training bots - not AI in general - are where most of the blocking debate actually lives, and why the publishing industry's response has split between refusal and negotiation: several large publishers block these crawlers outright, while others have signed licensing deals with the same operators. Both strategies start from the same place - knowing, concretely, how much of your archive is being read and by whom.
The norms here are young and still hardening. The better operators now publish user agents, IP ranges, and opt-out tokens, and honor robots.txt; others publish nothing and, by widely credited reports, crawl through disallow rules. Treat each crawler on its record rather than assuming the category behaves uniformly - and remember that a robots.txt line only ever governs the polite end of the spectrum.
Should you block it?
An anonymous crawler earns no benefit of the doubt: add the token to robots.txt, and if it keeps coming, block the FriendlyCrawler user agent at the server. There is no upside to allowing a bot you cannot identify.
Block via robots.txt
Add these lines to the robots.txt at your site root to ask FriendlyCrawler to stay away:
User-agent: FriendlyCrawler 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 FriendlyCrawler traffic on your site
You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every FriendlyCrawler 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 FriendlyCrawler doesn't run scripts.
Viz's answer is the request log: filter to FriendlyCrawler 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.