Bot management vendor
Known Agents
In short
Known Agents began in 2023 as Dark Visitors, a side project listing eight AI bots, and now serves a public agent directory that anyone can submit to. Customers feed it traffic from server-side hooks in CDNs and clouds; a free tier of one project suits small sites, and Growth costs USD 299 a month.
- Type
- Bot management
- Homepage
- knownagents.com
- In one line
- Agent analytics and access-control service, formerly Dark Visitors, that identifies AI agents and crawlers from server-side data, keeps an automatic robots.txt current, and blocks bots that ignore it or spoof trusted identities.
- Last read
- 2026-11-05
What Known Agents does for this layer
From the vendor's own pages
Known Agents says it began in 2023 as Dark Visitors, a side project documenting the eight known AI bots then on the web, and was founded in New York City. (knownagents.com) Known Agents' Automatic Robots.txt keeps crawler rules current as new agents appear, and its Bad Bot Blocking enforces them against bots that ignore robots.txt or spoof trusted identities. (knownagents.com) Known Agents collects traffic server-side through WordPress, Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud, Vercel, Node.js and REST API integrations. (knownagents.com) Known Agents' Agent Identification returns fields such as agent_token, agent_type_name and operator_name with a verification result for each request. (knownagents.com)
Known Agents prices Free at USD 0 for one project and 100,000 events, Startup at USD 29 a month for 1 million events, and Growth at USD 299 a month for 10 million events. (knownagents.com) Known Agents runs a public agent directory with a Submit an Agent form, listing entries such as Google-Agent, ElevenlabsBot and QualifiedBot. (knownagents.com)
Claims the vendor makes about itself
Known Agents says more than 5,000 websites use the platform. (knownagents.com) Known Agents' about page states "We are not an anti-bot company." (knownagents.com)
What our crawl saw
darkvisitors.com redirected to knownagents.com when fetched with the crawl user agent on 2026-11-05. (darkvisitors.com)
Products and plans
| Product | What it does | Price model | From | As of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent Analytics | Server-side analytics of AI agents, crawlers and scrapers, including robots.txt violations. | monthly by events | USD 0 | 2026-11-05 |
| Automatic Robots.txt | Robots.txt rules that update as new bots are found. | |||
| Bad Bot Blocking | Request-time blocking of bots that ignore robots.txt or spoof identities. | |||
| Agent Identification | API that names and verifies agents from incoming requests. | |||
Standards
| Standard | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| RFC 9309 (robots.txt) | Supports | Automatic Robots.txt publishes and updates robots.txt rules for compliant crawlers. (knownagents.com) |
| Web Bot Auth | No statement | Known Agents pages read 2026-11-05 do not name the verification method. |
Our checks
| Check | Result | Method | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage fetch | HTTP 200 | GET with the crawl user agent after a robots.txt check | 2026-11-05 |
What Known Agents does not do
- Known Agents' pages read do not say how it verifies agents; Web Bot Auth, IP lists and reverse DNS are not named (read 2026-11-05).
- Known Agents does not charge AI crawlers for access on a site owner's behalf.
Related pages on this site
Sources
Last reviewed 2026-11-05