How to block Clickagy
Operated by Clickagy. The Clickagy Intelligence Bot is an ad verification bot for Clickagy.
How it identifies itself
Clickagy Intelligence Bot v3
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: Clickagy Intelligence Bot v2 Disallow: /
nginx
In the server block, then reload.
# 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 ~* "(Clickagy Intelligence Bot v2|Clickagy Intelligence Bot v3)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "Clickagy Intelligence Bot v2" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Clickagy Intelligence Bot v3" bad_bot
<RequireAll>
Require all granted
Require not env bad_bot
</RequireAll>
Cloudflare
Security → WAF → Custom rules.
# Security → WAF → Custom rules, action: Block (http.user_agent contains "Clickagy Intelligence Bot v2") or (http.user_agent contains "Clickagy Intelligence Bot v3")
WordPress
A child theme's functions.php, or a small plugin.
// 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 (['Clickagy Intelligence Bot v2', 'Clickagy Intelligence Bot v3'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: Clickagy');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
Clickagy 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.