How to block cognitiveSEO Crawler
Operated by cognitive SEO Internet Marketing Tools.. CognitiveSEO is an SEO toolset that crawls the web and analyzes links.
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6 - James BOT - WebCrawler http://cognitiveseo.com/bot.html
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: cognitiveSEO 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 ~* "(James BOT|cognitiveSEO|cognitiveSEO Crawler)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "James BOT" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "cognitiveSEO" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "cognitiveSEO Crawler" 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 "James BOT") or (http.user_agent contains "cognitiveSEO") or (http.user_agent contains "cognitiveSEO Crawler")
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 (['James BOT', 'cognitiveSEO', 'cognitiveSEO Crawler'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: cognitiveSEO Crawler');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
cognitiveSEO Crawler 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.