PollyXBot

How it identifies itself

Every request it makes carries this user agent:

PollyXBot/1.0 (+https://pollyx.org/bot; contact@pollyx.org)

When it reads a page on your site, the robots.txt rules for the name PollyXBot apply, as described below.

When it visits

• When a sentiment report or an AI Visibility check runs: one a customer ordered or scheduled, or one of the brand pages PollyX publishes itself. PollyXBot does not crawl the web and does not build a search index.
• For each report it reads a small number of pages from a site, a few at a time, and stops waiting for a slow page within 20 seconds.

What it reads

• News articles that news indexes link to, so a report can use the article's text rather than just its headline.
• Pages that AI assistants cited in an AI Visibility check, to find out when each page was published.
• A brand's homepage, to find its official social accounts and to check how readable the site is for AI assistants: its robots.txt, llms.txt, structured data and sitemap.
• Public pages on forums, blogs, app stores, marketplaces and review sites where people talk about brands and products.

It does not log in, does not get past paywalls or bot checks, and does not fill in forms.

How it follows robots.txt

Before it reads a page, PollyXBot reads your robots.txt and follows it, as the robots.txt standard (RFC 9309) describes:

• Rules in a group for PollyXBot apply. If your robots.txt has no such group, the rules for all bots (User-agent: *) apply.
• The most specific matching rule wins, and an Allow wins a tie.
• If your robots.txt cannot be reached because of a server error or a timeout, PollyXBot does not read your site. If you have no robots.txt at all, nothing is restricted.
• A copy of your robots.txt is kept for at most 24 hours, so a change takes effect within a day.

How to block it

To keep PollyXBot out of your whole site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: PollyXBot
Disallow: /

To keep it out of part of your site, disallow only that path, for example Disallow: /account/.

What this page does not cover

• Official APIs that PollyX uses under their own terms, such as search engines' APIs, the YouTube Data API, Meta's APIs, GitHub, Stack Exchange and Wikipedia. Search results can include your pages' titles and snippets even when PollyXBot is blocked.
• Podcast feeds and episodes, which are downloaded the way a podcast app downloads them.
• Sources collected for us by data providers, which are named in our privacy policy. Those requests do not come from PollyXBot.

Contact

Questions, or a request about your site? Email contact@pollyx.org and include your domain. How PollyX turns what it reads into a report is described in our methodology.