Keyword discovery Content plan Article generation Site Guard Backlink exchange
Copilot MCP server Integrations
For agencies For SaaS For ecommerce For startups For local businesses
Free tools Compare Help center API docs Blog
Examples Pricing
Log in Try for free

RankYak Bot

What is RankYak?

RankYak is an SEO content platform that helps businesses create, optimize, and publish articles. As part of this process, our bot makes HTTP requests to websites on behalf of our users.

Why is this bot visiting my site?

RankYak's bot visits websites to:

  • Publish articles to your CMS (WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Shopify) on behalf of a RankYak user who has connected their site
  • Verify that published content is accessible at the expected URL
  • Check site connectivity when a user sets up a new integration
  • Read the pages of a site so RankYak can suggest links between them, once the site's owner has proven the site is theirs

The bot only visits sites that a RankYak user has explicitly connected to their account. It does not crawl the open web, and it does not follow links off your site.

How often does it make requests?

Publishing and connection checks are infrequent and targeted: a handful of requests per day at most.

Reading a site's pages is a crawl, and it is the one thing the bot does at volume. It runs once a day at most, and only for a site whose owner has verified ownership of it in Google Search Console and connected that property to RankYak. The crawl reads robots.txt first and obeys it. Without a Crawl-delay it makes at most four requests per second, and it never requests the same page twice in one run.

Opting out of the crawl

Add a rule for RankYakBot to your robots.txt. This stops the crawl entirely:

User-agent: RankYakBot
Disallow: /

You may also slow it down instead of stopping it. A delay of up to thirty seconds is honored as written; ask for more than that and the bot treats it as a refusal and does not crawl at all.

User-agent: RankYakBot
Crawl-delay: 10

Either way, RankYak keeps working for the site's owner: it falls back to reading the sitemap your robots.txt points at, which is a single request.

How to identify the bot

All requests from RankYak's bot include the following User-Agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; RankYakBot/2.0; +https://rankyak.com/bot)

Blocking or allowlisting

If you'd like to block RankYak's bot, you can filter requests by the User-Agent string shown above. Note that blocking the bot may prevent a RankYak user from publishing content to your site.

If you're experiencing issues or have questions, please reach out to us at [email protected].