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Navu

Navu crawls the websites requested by their customers and prospects to train AIs for them.
HivePoint, Inc.NavuBot
AI CrawlerAI Training

What is Navu?

Navu is HivePoint, Inc.'s crawler for websites selected by Navu customers and prospects. Navu indexes a site's content so its website AI can answer visitors' questions and provide links or citations from that site's own material.

The index can contain webpages, images, PDFs, videos, and forms. Navu says it discovers resources through sources such as sitemaps and site tracking, with crawling available as part of that work. A customer can add or remove URLs in the Navu portal instead of treating every discovered page as permanent.

Navu publishes desktop and mobile user agents that both end in NavuBot/1.0 (https://navu.co). Cloudflare's bot directory records those same two signatures. They resemble ordinary Chrome or mobile Safari traffic until the NavuBot suffix near the end of the string, so matching only the beginning would miss the identifier.

This is customer-specific AI training, not a documented crawl for a general foundation model or public AI search engine. Pages in a customer's Navu index can be used by that site's Navu AI and may appear in its answers as sources. Navu also lets the customer remove a page from training, mark it noindex to keep it out of search results and citations, or place it on a do-not-cite list while retaining it for training.

Robots behavior requires care. The bot metadata leaves compliance unknown, and Cloudflare's bot directory marks followsRobotsTxt as false. Navu's product manual mentions robots.txt as one source for discovering URLs, but that is not a promise to obey exclusion rules. A NavuBot group can state a preference without guaranteeing enforcement.

Navu's access guide publishes server addresses for customer allowlisting, but this facts record does not mark Navu as IP verified. Cloudflare also lists no HTTP-signature directory. An expected customer should use Navu's current access documentation and its own account configuration before opening a CDN rule; an unrelated site should not trust the user-agent suffix by itself.

Relevant for AI search

Is Navu relevant for AI search?

Yes. Navu collects pages for an AI product, so what it can crawl influences how AI systems describe your brand.

Navu gathers public web content that can end up in the training data for large language models. Once your pages are in that set, they influence how the operator's models talk about you for that model generation. Allowing it lets your own writing carry weight in those answers; blocking it means the models learn about you from third parties instead.

How to handle Navu

If your organization uses Navu, control the training set in the Navu portal. Remove URLs that should not train the site AI, and use Navu's citation settings when a page may inform answers but should not be linked. Keep gated source material protected according to the access method agreed with Navu.

A robots.txt group can publish a full-site exclusion:

User-agent: NavuBot
Disallow: /

The metadata does not confirm compliance, and Cloudflare says Navu does not follow robots.txt. Enforce a refusal at the CDN or application layer if needed. If Navu is expected, compare the complete desktop or mobile signature with its access guide and use the current server allowlist supplied there.

Do not treat a Navu IP or user agent as permission to read private content. The requested resource still needs the site's normal authentication and authorization.

Examples

  • A software vendor keeps product manuals in its Navu index but removes an obsolete migration guide so the website assistant stops using it.
  • A university marks an internal reference page `noindex`, allowing Navu to use the material for answers without offering the page as a citation.
  • A prospective customer recognizes the `NavuBot/1.0` suffix and confirms the fetch with Navu before changing its CDN allowlist.

Frequently asked questions about Navu

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

HivePoint, Inc. operates Navu. The crawler indexes sites requested by Navu customers and prospects for their website AI.

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