How is this different from Google Analytics?

Google Analytics shows you traffic. Shadow shows you traffic, AI bot activity, what AI platforms say about your brand, AND tells you what to do about all of it. It's analytics + AI intelligence + action steps in one tool.

Do I need to install anything?

For basic monitoring (bot detection, AI perception, readiness score) — nope, just enter your URL. For full visitor analytics (clicks, behavior, sessions), add one script tag. One-click integrations for Vercel, Shopify, WordPress, and more.

Will it slow down my site?

No. The script is under 5KB and loads async. Zero impact on page speed or Core Web Vitals. External monitoring has literally no impact — it watches from the outside.

What AI bots does Shadow detect?

All of them. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bytespider, Amazonbot, and dozens more. The Shadow Network means new bots get identified across all users instantly.

What do you mean by "actionable steps"?

Shadow doesn't just show you graphs. It says things like: "ChatGPT has your pricing wrong — add structured data to /pricing to fix it" or "Your bounce rate on /features is 68% — here's why and what to change." Specific, do-it-today recommendations.

Can Shadow block bots?

Shadow is a telescope, not a shield. It shows you who's visiting and what AI says about you. It generates block rules and robots.txt configs you can apply — but it doesn't intercept traffic.

Yes. Shadow never collects PII. IP addresses are hashed after classification. No cookies on your visitors. All Shadow Network data is anonymized. GDPR compliant by design.

How do I block HuggingFaceBot?

Add this to your robots.txt file: User-agent: HuggingFaceBot / Disallow: /

Does HuggingFaceBot respect robots.txt?

Yes, HuggingFaceBot by Hugging Face respects robots.txt directives.

AI Training Respects robots.txt

HuggingFaceBot

by Hugging Face First seen: 2021-03

About

Hugging Face's web crawler used to build and refresh AI training datasets hosted on the Hugging Face Hub. Hugging Face is the world's leading AI model and dataset repository, hosting over 500,000 models. Content scraped by HuggingFaceBot can appear in publicly accessible datasets used to train models by any organisation that downloads them — making it one of the broadest vectors for unattributed AI training use.

Purpose

AI dataset collection for Hugging Face Hub

User Agent String

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; HuggingFaceBot/1.0; +https://huggingface.co)

How to Control in robots.txt

🚫 Block HuggingFaceBot

User-agent: HuggingFaceBot
Disallow: /

✅ Allow HuggingFaceBot

User-agent: HuggingFaceBot
Allow: /

Is HuggingFaceBot crawling your site?

Run a free scan to check if Hugging Face's crawler is accessing your website.

Check if HuggingFaceBot is crawling YOUR site →