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How to block Adagio Bot

Operated by Adagio. Adagio demand optimization solutions help publishers leverage unlimited demand sources at unprecedented revenue level, while improving user experience, SPO and carbon footprint.

How it identifies itself

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Adagiobot/1.0) Chrome/112.0.5615.137 Safari/537.36

robots.txt

What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.

robots.txt
User-agent: Adagiobot
Disallow: /

nginx

In the server block, then reload.

nginx
# In the server block. 403 rather than 444: a closed connection tells the
# operator nothing, and an agent that gets a status code can log it.
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Adagiobot|Adagio|Adagio Bot)") {
    return 403;
}

Apache

In .htaccess or the vhost.

Apache
BrowserMatchNoCase "Adagiobot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Adagio" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Adagio Bot" bad_bot

<RequireAll>
    Require all granted
    Require not env bad_bot
</RequireAll>

Cloudflare

Security → WAF → Custom rules.

Cloudflare
# Security → WAF → Custom rules, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Adagiobot") or (http.user_agent contains "Adagio") or (http.user_agent contains "Adagio Bot")

WordPress

A child theme's functions.php, or a small plugin.

WordPress
// functions.php of a child theme, or a small plugin. Runs before WordPress
// builds the page, so a blocked agent costs one PHP process and no queries.
add_action('init', function () {
    $agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ?? '';

    foreach (['Adagiobot', 'Adagio', 'Adagio Bot'] as $needle) {
        if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
            status_header(403);
            exit('Blocked: Adagio Bot');
        }
    }
});

robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.

Adagio Bot publishes a token, so the directive above will work for as long as it keeps honouring it — and nothing except its own good manners makes it. The server rules match on a header the requester sets, which stops the agent that says who it is and not the one that copies somebody else's name. Botscope verifies identity against DNS and published address ranges, records which check decided each request, and shows you the ones that lied.

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Everything we know about Adagio Bot