What Channel3Bot does
Channel3Bot crawls product detail pages to index products into Channel3's product catalog so AI agents can find them, with the stated aim of driving traffic back to source websites. It collects product metadata such as images, titles, descriptions, prices, availability, variants, and attributes. The bot connects from AWS ECS instances using US-based IP addresses, respects robots.txt, and is configured to rate-limit concurrent requests. Suspicious traffic claiming to be Channel3Bot can be reported to bot@trychannel3.com.
How to control Channel3Bot
Target Channel3Bot in your robots.txt with the Channel3Bot token. Rules apply per bot, so you can allow this one while blocking others, or the reverse.
Allow Channel3Bot
User-agent: Channel3Bot
Allow: /Block Channel3Bot
User-agent: Channel3Bot
Disallow: /Channel3Bot can be verified by reverse DNS lookup (legitimate hostnames end in bot.trychannel3.com), and the doc notes that robots.txt files must be at the domain root because robots.txt on subdomains is not supported.
How to identify Channel3Bot
Temso identifies Channel3Bottraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
Channel3BotChannel3Bot FAQ
What is Channel3Bot?
Channel3Bot is Channel3's crawler that indexes product detail pages, including images, titles, descriptions, prices, availability, variants, and attributes, into Channel3's product catalog so AI agents can find products. Channel3 states its purpose is to drive traffic back to the source websites.
How do I block Channel3Bot?
Add a robots.txt group with "User-agent: Channel3Bot" and "Disallow: /" in the robots.txt file at your domain root. Channel3's documentation states the bot respects robots.txt but does not support robots.txt files on subdomains, so the rules must live at the root domain.
About AI Search Crawlers
Crawlers that build the retrieval indexes behind AI search products like ChatGPT search and Perplexity. They decide which pages can be cited as sources.
Blocking these keeps your content out of the source index: AI search products can't cite pages they can't crawl.
