Novellum AI Crawl: Robots.txt & Crawl Policy Reference

AI Summary: Novellum AI Crawl is a training crawler operated by Novellum. Its primary function is to read public web pages and feed that content into machine-learning pipelines for AI agent evaluation and training.

Role and policy boundary

This bot operates as a background scraper, building datasets for Novellum's AI tools and evaluation platforms. If you wish to prevent your site's content from being used to train or evaluate Novellum's models, you must explicitly block this crawler.

A robots rule is a declaration of intent; it does not replace authentication, authorization, or rate limiting. Start with a dedicated group:

User-agent: novellum-ai-crawl
Allow: /
Disallow: /staging/
Disallow: /internal/

To stop access for the entire site, use:

User-agent: novellum-ai-crawl
Disallow: /

Avoid assuming that User-agent: * expresses the same business intent. A wildcard can affect assistant and training crawlers too, and it makes later audits harder because the source of the decision is less specific.

Layered verification

Verify the same URL through each control plane instead of assuming that one green signal represents the whole request path. Compare the bot-specific robots group, the page-level metadata, and the response headers captured at the public edge.

Novellum AI Crawl is expected to respect standard robots.txt directives. Adding a specific Disallow rule for this User-Agent is the recommended first step to opt out of their data collection.

The Policy Engine evaluates the selected user-agent, path scope, and the other supplied layers independently. It can therefore explain why a bot is allowed while another is blocked, rather than returning one blended website score.

Page-level directives can still override the intended outcome for indexing:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

If a response uses these tags, the report marks the result as blocked or conflicting even if the crawler-specific robots group is permissive. This is especially important for canonical pages served through an edge cache where headers may differ from the origin response.

WAF and Nginx remediation examples

To enforce a strict block and conserve server resources, implement a network-level rule:

{
  "description": "Block Novellum AI Crawl",
  "expression": "lower(http.user_agent) contains \"novellum-ai-crawl\"",
  "action": "block"
}

Use your platform's actual middleware response pattern rather than copying this simplified example without review. Never place a secret, verification token, or internal policy identifier in a public response header.

map $http_user_agent $block_novellum_ai_crawl_private {
    default 0;
    ~*novellum-ai-crawl 1;
}

server {
    location ~ ^/(admin|account|private|licensed|internal|api)/ {
        if ($block_novellum_ai_crawl_private) { return 403; }
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

Review checklist

Use this checklist after every policy change and after a CDN or WAF migration. Record the request URL, User-Agent, HTTP status, final redirect, and the exact evidence used to reach the decision.

Verify that the dedicated group appears before relying on a wildcard, test a representative public and private path, and compare live response headers with robots.txt. Keep the policy close to the content owner's intent and record whether the site wants discovery, citation, or no access at all.

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