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 Scrapy?

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

Does Scrapy respect robots.txt?

No, Scrapy by Open Source (Zyte) has been observed ignoring robots.txt directives.

Other Ignores robots.txt

Scrapy

by Open Source (Zyte) First seen: 2008-01

About

The default user agent for Scrapy, a popular open-source web scraping framework. While Scrapy itself is a tool, its default bot signature appears on millions of crawl requests daily.

Purpose

General-purpose web scraping framework

User Agent String

Scrapy/2.11 (+https://scrapy.org)

How to Control in robots.txt

🚫 Block Scrapy

User-agent: Scrapy
Disallow: /

✅ Allow Scrapy

User-agent: Scrapy
Allow: /

⚠️ Scrapy has been observed ignoring robots.txt directives. You may need server-level blocking (e.g., firewall rules or user-agent filtering) to effectively prevent access.

Is Scrapy crawling your site?

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