Website owners sometimes notice unusual crawler activity in server logs or Cloudflare analytics. One crawler that often appears is Leikibot, a bot that scans websites for data analysis and advertising verification. If your server shows frequent requests from this bot, you may want to control or block its access to reduce unnecessary server load.
This guide explains what Leikibot is, why it crawls websites, and how to block it safely using Cloudflare, robots.txt, or server rules.
What Is Leikibot?
Leikibot is a web crawler operated by DoubleVerify, a company that provides advertising verification and brand-safety monitoring services. The crawler scans public webpages to analyze content, detect ad placement issues, and collect marketing intelligence.
Unlike search engine bots such as Googlebot or Bingbot, Leikibot does not index websites for search results. Instead, it gathers information for analytics and monitoring purposes.
A typical Leikibot user agent looks like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3;compatible; Leikibot/1.0; +http://www.leiki.com)If you check server logs or security analytics, you may see multiple requests from this user agent.
Why Leikibot Is Crawling Your Website
Leikibot visits websites that contain data relevant to advertising analysis or market monitoring. The crawler typically scans pages such as:
- blog articles
- product pages
- category listings
- marketing content
- brand mentions
These crawlers analyze content patterns, brand safety indicators, and advertising environments.
However, some websites experience high crawl frequency, which may increase server load or cause performance issues.
How to Detect Leikibot in Server Logs
You can identify Leikibot activity by checking the User-Agent field in your server logs or analytics dashboard.
Example log entry:
IP: 34.xxx.xxx.xxx
Request: GET /
User-Agent: Leikibot/1.0If you see repeated requests from this user agent across multiple pages, the crawler is actively scanning your site.
You may also see this activity in:
- Cloudflare Security Events
- hosting server logs
- WordPress security plugins
- analytics tools
Does Leikibot Affect SEO?
Leikibot does not affect search rankings.
Search engines rely on their own crawlers such as:
- Googlebot
- Bingbot
- Applebot
- DuckDuckBot
Blocking Leikibot will not impact indexing or search traffic.
Many website owners block intelligence-gathering crawlers to prevent excessive crawling or competitive data scraping.
How to Block Leikibot Crawling Your Website
You can block Leikibot using several methods depending on your hosting setup.
Method 1: Block Leikibot Using Cloudflare (Recommended)
If your website uses Cloudflare, you can block the crawler before it reaches your server.
Steps
- Log in to Cloudflare Dashboard
- Select your website
- Open Security → WAF
- Click Create Rule
- Add this expression:
(http.user_agent contains "Leikibot")- Set the action to Block
- Save the rule
Cloudflare will now stop Leikibot requests at the edge, which reduces server load.
Method 2: Block Leikibot in robots.txt
You can also restrict the crawler using your robots.txt file.
Add this rule:
User-agent: Leikibot
Disallow: /This instructs the bot not to crawl your website.
However, robots.txt works only if the crawler respects the directive.
Method 3: Block Leikibot Using Server Configuration
If you control your server configuration, you can block the crawler through your web server.
Apache (.htaccess)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Leikibot [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Nginx
if ($http_user_agent ~* Leikibot) {
return 403;
}These rules prevent requests from the Leikibot user agent.
When Should You Block Leikibot?
You may consider blocking the crawler if:
- it sends too many requests
- your server returns 503 errors
- it scans large numbers of pages
- you want to prevent competitor intelligence scraping
Blocking it is safe because the crawler does not contribute to search engine indexing.
Controlling crawler access helps maintain better website performance and ensures that only essential search engine bots crawl your content.
