Which idealo-bot variant respects robots.txt?

Idealo explicitly says the Price Validator respects robots.txt restrictions. The same commitment is not stated for the other published variants, even though they share the `idealo-bot` token.

Will the Price Validator see a JavaScript-only price?

Not reliably. Idealo says the Price Validator does not execute JavaScript, so the price should be present in the response it can read.

Does the Image Downloader crawl product pages?

No. Idealo says it requests the image URLs provided in partner offer data directly, so that job does not add product-page requests.

Does idealo-bot feed AI search or model training?

No such use is documented. Idealo describes a set of price comparison and partner-shop checks, not a crawler for generative answers or training data.

Idealo & AI Search: What to Know

What is Idealo?

A request from idealo-bot can belong to one of several services rather than a single general-purpose crawl. Idealo runs these services against partner shops to check the product information used by its price comparison site.

The suffix in the user agent tells you what the request is doing. pricevalidator compares a submitted price with the merchant's product page, inventoryanalyser checks submitted offers against the shop, and badgechecker looks for a correctly installed Idealo badge. The inventory-image-downloader variant fetches image URLs that the shop has already supplied. It does not crawl the product page to find them.

This activity can affect how current and complete a partner's offers appear on Idealo. The Price Validator does not execute JavaScript, so a price that exists only after client-side rendering may not be available to that check. Idealo says only the Price Validator respects robots.txt; its bot page does not make that promise for every variant.

Nothing in Idealo's bot documentation connects these requests to language-model training or generative search. They support product comparison, offer quality checks, badge verification, and image handling. An idealo-bot visit is therefore not evidence that an AI search system is indexing the page.

Indirectly relevant

Is Idealo relevant for AI search?

Indirectly. Idealo has no AI product of its own, but its output can end up in the systems that AI answers draw on.

Idealo collects content from many sites and redistributes it through its own product. Aggregated copies can end up in datasets that AI systems later learn from, and some aggregators are themselves sources that AI answer engines draw on.

How to handle Idealo

Partner shops should first identify the suffix in their logs. Product pages may need to remain available to the Price Validator and Inventory Analyser, while image hosts need only serve the image URLs supplied to Idealo. A blanket block can interrupt all of those jobs at once and may leave offer data or imagery out of date.

The family has a stable token, so a full robots rule is possible:

User-agent: idealo-bot
Disallow: /

Use narrower path rules when the concern is limited to one part of the shop. Then check the resulting traffic. Idealo explicitly documents robots compliance for the Price Validator, but not for the Inventory Analyser, Badge Checker, or Image Downloader, so the rule is only a confirmed control for that one variant.

Examples

A merchant fixes a mismatched price and later finds `idealo-bot pricevalidator` on the affected product URL, confirming which Idealo service revisited it.
An image host receives `idealo-bot inventory-image-downloader` requests for files listed in a partner feed, without corresponding requests to the product pages.

Frequently asked questions about Idealo

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

Each suffix names a separate job. Idealo publishes variants for validating prices, analysing inventory, checking badge installation, and downloading product images from supplied URLs.