ImagesiftBot
Hive (ImageSift) · Unconfirmed · robots.txt: Yes
Crawls the web for publicly available images, saving each with its page URL, page text and alt text, for Hive’s image-search and web intelligence products.
Block ImagesiftBot
User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Disallow: /Unconfirmed by the operator Hive (ImageSift)'s documentation we checked does not say what blocking ImagesiftBot changes beyond the crawler itself.
Allow ImagesiftBot
User-agent: ImagesiftBot
Allow: /An allow group only changes anything if a broader rule would block ImagesiftBot. Under the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309, section 2.2.1) a crawler follows the group that names it and uses the User-agent: * group only when no group does — so this group lets it in even if your * group says Disallow: /. Token matching is case-insensitive.
Put these lines in /robots.txt at the root of each host (each subdomain has its own file). robots.txt is a request to well-behaved crawlers, not access control.
Already have a robots.txt? Paste it into the robots.txt checker to see whether it blocks ImagesiftBot on a given path, and which line decides.
Facts
- Operator
- Hive (ImageSift)
- Purpose
- Unconfirmed by the operator
Hive says it collects public images, with the page URL, page text and alt text, into an index its web intelligence products use for search and retrieval of similar images. It does not describe this as AI training, AI search or a user fetch.
- Obeys robots.txt
- Yes. Hive says robots.txt rules that target ImagesiftBot are respected and that it honours Crawl-delay. If no group names ImagesiftBot but one names Googlebot, it follows the Googlebot group — so a Googlebot rule can apply to it even though this site’s RFC 9309 checker reads only its own token and *.
- In your server logs
- The user-agent is "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ImagesiftBot; +imagesift.com)".
- How to verify it
- Unconfirmed by the operator Hive (ImageSift)'s documentation we checked gives no IP list or DNS check for this crawler, so a request claiming to be ImagesiftBot cannot be verified against the operator.
What Hive (ImageSift) says
Quoted word for word from the operator's documentation.
“ImageSiftBot is a web crawler that scrapes the internet for publicly available images to support our suite of web intelligence products”
“Once images and text are downloaded from a webpage, ImageSift analyzes this data from the page and stores the information in an index. Our web intelligence products use this index to enable search and retrieval of similar images.”
“Standard directives in robots.txt that target ImagesiftBot are respected.”
“ImagesiftBot also supports the crawl-delay directive in robots.txt files.”
“If there is no rule targeting ImagesiftBot, but there is a rule targeting Googlebot, then ImagesiftBot will follow the Googlebot directives.”
“Requests from ImageSiftBot set the User-Agent to: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ImagesiftBot; +imagesift.com)”
Sources
- Imagesift by Hive: ImageSift Bot — fetched and checked 2026-09-24