What is ImagesiftBot ?
ImagesiftBot is a web crawler developed to collect publicly available images across the internet. It supports Hive’s suite of web intelligence products by indexing visual content from websites. According to sources such as DataDome, its behavior focuses on parsing image tags and metadata to support image-based search optimization.
Who is operating ImagesiftBot ?
ImagesiftBot is operated by Castle Global, Inc., the company behind Hive, a firm specializing in AI-powered solutions including image recognition, content moderation, and large-scale media indexing. While the Hive branding is visible on the product side (see thehive.ai), official bot documentation attributes ownership to Castle Global.
Why you should be interested in ImagesiftBot ?
For webmasters, the presence of ImagesiftBot may raise questions about content indexing and server resource usage. The bot can impact image bandwidth usage and indexing policies. Understanding and potentially controlling its access can help site owners protect intellectual property, maintain analytics accuracy, and control load. Since the bot does not consistently respect `robots.txt` directives (as flagged by DataDome), explicit blocking strategies might be necessary.
How to block ImagesiftBot ?
1. Robots.txt File :
Add the following rule to your robots.txt file
# block ImagesiftBot User-agent: ImagesiftBot Disallow: /
2. IP Address Blocking :
Monitor server logs to identify the IP ranges used by ImagesiftBot and block them via your firewall or server configuration.
3. User-Agent Filtering:
Configure your server (Apache, Nginx, etc.) to deny access to requests with the user-agent string “ImagesiftBot”.
4. CAPTCHA and Rate Limiting:
Introduce CAPTCHAs or request throttling for suspicious request patterns, especially those lacking JavaScript execution.
About the bot
Owner: Castle Global, Inc.
Owner URL: thehive.ai
Bot URL: imagesift.com
Bot User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ImagesiftBot; +imagesift.com)
Respects robots.txt: No (according to multiple bot monitoring services including DataDome)
