Who operates Rakuten Image extraction bot?

Rakuten Image extraction bot is operated by Rakuten. It functions as Rakuten's content aggregator.

Does Rakuten Image extraction bot respect robots.txt?

Rakuten has not published a robots.txt commitment for Rakuten Image extraction bot. Treat its behavior as unconfirmed and watch your access logs to see whether your rules are honored.

Should I block Rakuten Image extraction bot?

It depends on your distribution strategy. Keep Rakuten Image extraction bot allowed to reach the audiences it serves, or disallow it to keep readers on your own site.

Rakuten Image extraction bot - What It Is & How to Handle It

What is Rakuten Image extraction bot?

Rakuten Image extraction bot is Rakuten's content aggregator. Rakuten uses this bot to crawl product images so that we can display cashbach deals for our merchants.

Rakuten Image extraction bot collects and redistributes content from across the web, so pages it can reach may be surfaced to audiences well beyond your own site. Aggregated copies also become part of the corpus AI systems draw on, which makes it worth knowing what Rakuten Image extraction bot takes and how often.

Like any automated client, Rakuten Image extraction bot consumes crawl budget and appears in your server and CDN logs. Reviewing those logs alongside your robots.txt rules helps you keep automated traffic deliberate and easy to reason about.

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How to handle Rakuten Image extraction bot

Allow Rakuten Image extraction bot if you want your content distributed through the feeds and apps it supplies. Disallow it if you would rather people reach that content only on your own site.

To control Rakuten Image extraction bot, add a rule for its user agent to your robots.txt:

User-agent: rakutenusabot-image
Disallow: /

Rakuten does not publish a robots.txt commitment for Rakuten Image extraction bot, so confirm how it behaves by watching your access logs.

Examples

A publisher checks how often Rakuten Image extraction bot pulls new articles and whether the aggregated version links back to the original.
An editor keeps Rakuten Image extraction bot allowed so new posts reach the readers of the apps it supplies.