Reflectionbot
Reflection AI's crawler for building and improving its models. Publishes an IP list and reverse DNS names, and asks for robots.txt rather than 403s.
| Operator | Reflection AI |
|---|---|
| Type | AI: AI training |
| robots.txt token | Reflectionbot |
| Follows robots.txt | Yes, by the operator's account; Crawl-delay not documented |
| Sends visitors | No |
| Links to your pages | No |
| Can end up in AI training | Yes |
| Verification |
reverse DNS, IP list
Reverse DNS under reflection.ai
Our tracker does not verify it yet. |
| Our call |
Publisher: Block E-commerce: Allow Expert site: Allow What the profiles mean |
How to recognize it
User agent, as it reaches our logs (the same as Reflection’s example):
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Reflectionbot/1.0; +https://reflection.ai/bot) Chrome/151.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Reflection says this is the only user agent it crawls with. Match on Reflectionbot.
- robots.txt token:
Reflectionbot - IP list (JSON): ips.json
- Reverse DNS: names under
reflection.ai, such asreflectionbot-*.reflection.ai.
What it does
Reflectionbot visits public pages to help build and improve Reflection AI’s models. It reads and honours robots.txt, and Reflection asks site owners to use robots.txt instead of blocking it with 403s.
What you gain by allowing it
- Presence in what Reflection’s models learn from. There is no link or click.
What you lose
By allowing it
- Content used for training with no traffic or payment in return.
By blocking it
- Presence in Reflection’s training data. A publisher keeps leverage; an expert site gives up a channel.
How to verify it
Match the IP against ips.json, or reverse DNS to reflection.ai confirmed forward. Cloudflare flags it as a verified bot in the category “AI Crawler”. Our trackers do not check Reflection’s list yet; the match below was done by hand.
Gotchas and history
- JavaScript: it runs JavaScript only when the HTML is empty, sending such pages to a second fetcher; see Reflectionbot runs JavaScript only when the HTML is empty.
- Network label: Cloudflare reports its addresses under AS396982, Google Cloud’s network number, while the list puts them in
16.216.88.0/23and16.216.94.0/23. Trust the list, not the ASN.
What we observed
Data: Cloudflare Logpush for two of our sites, 19-26 October 2026 (8 days).
- 731 requests, all from addresses on Reflection’s list and all flagged by Cloudflare. The scanner did not use this name.
- They covered 679 different paths, nearly all on the static content site, and 725 got a 200. 13 were for
/robots.txt.
About Reflection AI
Reflection AI runs one crawler, Reflectionbot, and says it crawls with no other user agent. The crawler builds and improves Reflection’s models. Reflection publishes an IP list and reverse DNS names under reflection.ai, and asks for robots.txt rules rather than 403s.