How to block Huckabuy Bot
Operated by Huckabuy. Huckabot is Huckabuy’s main crawler which is utilized by almost all of Huckabuy’s products. The primary purpose of Huckabot is to crawl and index a customer’s website, which is then rendered and optimized with our Dynamic Rendering Product. Several of the Page Speed product boosters, such as Fold Prioritization, also leverage Huckabot in order to optimize and improve a website’s performance.
How it identifies itself
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Huckabot/0.0; +https://huckabuy.com/)
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: Huckabot 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 ~* "(Huckabot/|Huckabot|Huckabuy|Huckabuy Bot)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "Huckabot/" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Huckabot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Huckabuy" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Huckabuy Bot" 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 "Huckabot/") or (http.user_agent contains "Huckabot") or (http.user_agent contains "Huckabuy") or (http.user_agent contains "Huckabuy Bot")
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 (['Huckabot/', 'Huckabot', 'Huckabuy', 'Huckabuy Bot'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: Huckabuy Bot');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
Huckabuy 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.