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Can AI see it

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What is IAS crawler?

Direct Answer: IAS crawler is a bot operated by Integral Ad Science for digital ad verification and content rating.

Operator: Integral Ad Science Type: Advertising Bot Purpose: Content rating and digital ad verification

The IAS crawler is a bot used by Integral Ad Science (IAS) to crawl websites and provide content rating and certification services for brands, agencies, ad-networks, and publishers. By crawling sites, IAS can accurately rate site content and refine its certification services for content rating and invalid traffic. The bot identifies itself as 'IAS Crawler (ias_crawler; http://integralads.com/site-indexing-policy/)'.

User-Agent Identification

The following user-agent strings identify IAS crawler in your live traffic data:

  • IAS crawler (ias_crawler; http://integralads.com/site-indexing-policy/)

robots.txt Rules for IAS crawler

Respects robots.txt: No

Use the following robots.txt rules to control IAS crawler access:

# Block IAS crawler
User-agent: ias_crawler
Disallow: /

# Allow IAS crawler
User-agent: ias_crawler
Allow: /

This bot does not commit to following robots.txt

IAS crawler does not officially follow robots.txt directives. The only reliable way to control access is through server-side blocking (IP filtering, user-agent rules in your web server config) combined with log monitoring to verify effectiveness.

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Crawl Behavior

Frequency:Not Documented

Request Pattern:Seeks Out Robots.Txt File Prior To Crawling

Official Documentation Quotes

"Allowing our robots to crawl your site is essential for us to be able to provide an accurate rating of your site’s content and to further refine our certification services for content rating and invalid traffic."

"If our “IAS Crawler” robot is blocked, we will be unable to provide an accurate rating of your site and thus your site will be inaccessible to any of our partner advertisers."

Crawl Activity Index

Relative crawl activity for IAS crawler over the past 28 days. Higher values indicate increased crawling intensity compared to the period baseline.

View recent activity data (last 7 days)
Date Activity Index
Mar 26, 2026 88.0
Mar 27, 2026 82.7
Mar 28, 2026 83.1
Mar 29, 2026 81.8
Mar 30, 2026 87.3
Mar 31, 2026 90.2
Apr 1, 2026 88.8

Source: Cloudflare Radar

Why track IAS crawler traffic?

Verify ad system crawling behavior. IAS crawler evaluates your pages for ad targeting, quality scoring, and policy compliance.

Optimize ad delivery. If IAS crawler can't properly access certain pages, ad targeting and revenue may be impacted. Log monitoring confirms accessibility.

Log Verification

To verify IAS crawler traffic in your live traffic data:

  1. Search access logs for the user-agent strings listed above
  2. Check if the IP addresses match documented ranges (if provided by Integral Ad Science)
  3. Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
  4. Use reverse DNS lookup for additional verification if available

IP Verification: Integral Ad Science provides official IP verification via Published IP ranges. View verification instructions →

Public facing IPs are listed

Note: Observed behavior in production environments may differ from official documentation. Live traffic monitoring provides the only reliable verification of actual bot behavior.

Undocumented Information

The following information is not officially documented for IAS crawler:

  • crawl frequency
  • JavaScript rendering

Official Documentation

View Official IAS crawler Documentation →

Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.