Aolbot-News
AOL news article crawler for aol.com content
About this crawler
Aolbot-News is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Aolbot-News in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as search-engine. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block Aolbot-News traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.
Block-rate · top 25k sites
No block-rate data for this crawler.
Technical details
- Name
- Aolbot-News
- Pattern
Aolbot-News- Tags
- search-engine
- Reference
- https://help.aol.com/articles/aolbot
- Added
- 2026/05/02
- rDNS suffixes
.aol.com- Instances
- 1 known sample(s)
rDNS verification (FCrDNS)
Verify a request is genuinely Aolbot-News with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.
.aol.com
Sample User-Agent strings
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Aolbot-News; +https://help.aol.com/articles/aolbot)
Block this crawler
robots.txt — disallow Aolbot-News:
User-agent: Aolbot-News
Disallow: /
Apache .htaccess — return 403:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Aolbot-News [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:
if ($http_user_agent ~* "Aolbot-News") {
return 403;
}
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