Scrapy: what it is, what it does with your content, and what blocking it costs
What Scrapy is
Scrapy collects pages to train future models. It does not decide whether Zyte (open source) can cite you in an answer today — that is a different crawler with a different token. Blocking Scrapy is a decision about your content being learned from, not about your visibility.
Operator: Zyte (open source)
robots.txt token: Scrapy
User-agent on the wire: not published by the operator
Category: Model training
What blocking it actually costs
A generic scraping framework rather than one company's crawler. Blocking the token stops only the operators polite enough to keep the default user-agent, which is a real but partial defence.
How to block Scrapy
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: Scrapy
Disallow: /
The token must appear on its own User-agent: line. A named group replaces the User-agent: * group rather than adding to it, so anything you also want disallowed for this crawler has to be repeated inside its group.
How to allow Scrapy
User-agent: Scrapy
Allow: /
An explicit allow is worth writing even when you have no blanket block: it documents the decision, and it survives someone later adding a restrictive User-agent: * rule without thinking about AI crawlers.
robots.txt is not the only thing that can block it
A permissive robots.txt does not mean Scrapy can reach you. WAF rules, Cloudflare's bot-management settings, rate limits and country blocks all sit in front of robots.txt and answer first. A site whose robots.txt welcomes Scrapy and whose edge returns 403 to it is blocked in every way that matters — and nothing in robots.txt will tell you so.
This is the gap the AI Crawler Access Checker was built to close: it reads robots.txt and sends a real request carrying the crawler's user-agent, so you see what the crawler sees.
Common questions
- What user-agent does Scrapy send?
Zyte (open source) does not publish an exact user-agent string for Scrapy. Match on the
Scrapytoken in robots.txt rather than on a full string you found elsewhere.- How do I block Scrapy?
Add a group to robots.txt naming the token exactly:
User-agent: Scrapy Disallow: /The group must name
Scrapyon its own line. AUser-agent: *group does not combine with a named one — under RFC 9309 the most specific matching group replaces the wildcard entirely, it does not inherit from it.- What does blocking Scrapy cost me?
A generic scraping framework rather than one company's crawler. Blocking the token stops only the operators polite enough to keep the default user-agent, which is a real but partial defence.
- Can I tell a real Scrapy request from a fake one?
Not reliably. Zyte (open source) does not publish verified IP ranges for Scrapy, so the user-agent string is the only signal, and anyone can send it. Treat robots.txt as a statement of policy rather than as enforcement.
Is Scrapy blocked on your site right now?
Reading your own robots.txt only answers half of it — a firewall rule can block Scrapy while robots.txt says it is welcome. The checker tests both.
Check your site free