linkfluence bot

The linkfluence bot is an intelligence-gathering web crawler for the media monitoring company Meltwater (which acquired Linkfluence in 2021). It is designed to collect and analyze public web data for brand sentiment and market insights. The crawler systematically visits websites, blogs, forums, and social media platforms to gather content relevant to its clients. It identifies itself with the user-agent string linkfluence or YaK/1.0, and it is designed to respect standard web protocols like robots.txt.

The linkfluence bot is visiting your website to collect data for one of Meltwater's clients. It targets content that mentions specific brands, products, or topics that are being monitored. If your site publishes content related to industry trends, consumer opinions, or popular brands, it is a natural target for this crawler's data collection efforts. The frequency of visits depends on the relevance of your content to Meltwater's clients. This crawling is considered authorized as it only accesses publicly available information.

The purpose of the linkfluence bot is to serve as a data collection tool for Meltwater's consumer insights and brand monitoring services. The data it gathers helps brands understand their online presence, track public sentiment, and benchmark against competitors. For website owners, there is no direct benefit from being crawled, as the service is designed to benefit Meltwater's clients. However, the crawler is designed to be respectful of server resources and to operate within ethical and legal boundaries, including GDPR.

If you wish to prevent the linkfluence bot from accessing your website, you can add rules to your robots.txt file. There are two primary user-agents associated with the service.

To block these crawlers, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: linkfluence
Disallow: /

User-agent: YaK
Disallow: /