Sidetrade indexer bot

What Sidetrade indexer bot does

Sidetrade sells AI-powered accounts-receivable and order-to-cash software, and its indexer bot collects public web data about companies to feed the models behind it. The bot announces itself plainly in logs as Sidetrade indexer bot, but Sidetrade publishes no crawler documentation and no robots.txt policy.

Why it visits your site

Your site describes a business, and business data is what its models eat.

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?

It offers you nothing in return and documents nothing about its behavior, so blocking is a reasonable default. Add the token to robots.txt, and fall back to user-agent blocking at the server if it does not listen.

Block via robots.txt

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

User-agent: Sidetrade indexer bot
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 Sidetrade indexer bot traffic on your site

You have three windows onto it, each with a catch. Raw hosting access logs contain every Sidetrade indexer bot 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 Sidetrade indexer bot doesn't run scripts.

Viz's answer is the request log: filter to Sidetrade indexer bot 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.