What is Barkrowler?

How often is Barkrowler impersonated?

For the median organisation, under 1% of requests claiming to be Barkrowler failed verification.

Measured between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026 across organisations protected by Centinel. We only publish a share when at least five organisations each saw enough of these requests. Pooled across all of their requests, the share was under 1%: a few large organisations carry most of the traffic, so the median organisation is the better guide to what yours will see.

This directory measures requests between 14 July 2026 and 10 October 2026. The fake crawler report covers its own, earlier window (late June to 21 September 2026), so its figures differ from the ones here. Read it for the method.

Have a request that claims to be Barkrowler? Check its IP address.

Should you block Barkrowler?

Allow it if

you or your partners use this tool's backlink or audit data, or the crawl load is not a concern.

Block it if

the crawl load is noticeable and you have no use for the tool's data. Blocking it does not affect search rankings.

What blocking changes

Babbar stops crawling your site.

To block it, add this group to your robots.txt. Babbar says Barkrowler respects robots.txt and Crawl-delay, and by default waits 5 seconds between requests to the same host.

User-agent: barkrowler
Disallow: /

robots.txt only asks. It does nothing against a client that ignores it or only pretends to be Barkrowler. Stopping those takes verification at your edge.