A summary of the Grammarly Internet robot. Including details for the owner, description, HTTP user agent and whether this robot adheres to the robot exclusion standard.
Who owns the Grammarly robot? Is it a good or a bad robot? And why is it visiting your website?
Shown below is a sample log file entry for the Grammarly web robot. It’s derived from an Apache web server log file. From the log entry information about how the robot identifies itself, HTTP User Agent, and where it is hosted are given.
Server Log File
vntweb.co.uk 34.200.185.125 - - [23/May/2019:22:42:43 +0100] "GET /creating-a-robots-txt-file/ HTTP/1.1" 200 7740 "-" "Grammarly/1.0 (http://www.grammarly.com)"
HTTP User Agent
Grammarly/1.0
IP Addresses
The observed IP address was 34.200.185.125.
WHOIS DNS command gives the following information about the IP address:
| NetRange: | 34.192.0.0 – 34.255.255.255 |
| NetName: | AT-88-Z |
| OrgName: | Amazon Technologies Inc. |
| Address: | 410 Terry Ave N. |
| City: | Seattle |
| StateProv: | WA |
| PostalCode: | 98109 |
| Country: | US |
| Updated: | 2017-01-28 |
As can be seen from the above the observed IP address is a part of a block assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc.
nslookup DNS command gives
125.185.200.34.in-addr.arpa name = ec2-34-200-185-125.compute-1.amazonaws.com.
Owner
Grammarly Inc.
Country
USA
Exclusion
The user-agent string includes a reference to the website https://www.grammarly.com/
The referenced website does not provide information specific to the Grammarly robot. confirms that the bot supports the robots exclusion text and also obeys the crawl delay.
The robots.txt exclusion standard, which was described at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html#robotstxt, but is not currently available. Information is available on the same website https://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and also on the w3c website at https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.1.
If you wish to prevent the robot from indexing a website and to control the crawl rate.
You may wish to try the following entry in the robots.txt file to prevent Grammarly from visiting your site
User-agent: Grammarly Disallow: /
You may wish to trial controlling the frequency of Grammarly visiting your site, setting a minimum acceptable delay between consecutive requests can be set with the following added to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: Grammarly Crawl-Delay: 10
In this example the delay has been set to 10 seconds.
As is common with website crawlers there is a delay between changes made to the robots.txt file and the change being implemented.
Take care making changes to the robots.txt file. A misunderstanding in configuration or an error in configuration can lead to important search engines excluding your website.
Further Info
Grammarly provides an online proofreading service. Features include spell checking; grammar checking and plagiarism detection.
Grammarly is used to improve writing: correcting spelling errors; grammar and providing a thesaurus of alternative words.
There are extensions available for the common browsers. Also for Microsoft’s recent Windows operating systems and Mac OS.
But not support for Linux.
There’s even a keyboard for Apple and Android devices. The Grammarly Keyboard checks your typing ensuring your grammar, spelling, punctuation and vocabulary are correct.
