How to block HubSpot Crawler
Operated by HubSpot. HubSpot offers a full platform of marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM software — plus the methodology, resources, and support — to help businesses grow better. Get started with free tools, and upgrade as you grow.
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.116 Safari/537.36 HubSpot Webcrawler - [email protected]
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: HubSpot Connect 2.0 (http: 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 ~* "(HubSpot Crawler|HubSpot Connect 2.0 (http:)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "HubSpot Crawler" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "HubSpot Connect 2.0" 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 "HubSpot Crawler") or (http.user_agent contains "HubSpot Connect 2.0")
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 (['HubSpot Crawler', 'HubSpot Connect 2.0'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: HubSpot Crawler');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
HubSpot 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.