ShapBot: Parallel's search crawler
ShapBot is the crawler Parallel uses to build the search index behind its web APIs, which AI agents and apps query.
Picked is an AI visibility tool for agencies and B2B SaaS teams. It asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers the prompts your buyers ask, records which brands and pages they name, and writes the article built to become the source they quote.
At a glance
ShapBot in one table
- Company
- Parallel
- What it's for
- Search index: read into the index an ai assistant searches.
- robots.txt token
ShapBot- Full user agent
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ShapBot/0.1.0- Follows robots.txt
- Follows it. Parallel says blocking it stops indexing, which may lower the site's visibility in its search APIs.
- How to verify
- Check the visitor's IP against the list Parallel publishes. A request outside it isn't ShapBot, whatever its user agent says. The IP list
- Source
- Parallel's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
Real data
What ShapBot read on a real site
LaunchOn.it, our own launch platform, tracked in Picked through Cloudflare from September 12 to October 11, 2026. One site, so read it as an example, not an average.
1,939
Requests in 30 days
136
Different pages read
5 of 30
Days it came
100%
Verified by Cloudflare as the real bot
99% of its requests got a page back; 0% hit an address that doesn't exist.
- /api/86%
- /use-cases/5%
- /_next/2%
- /tags/1%
- /tech/1%
By the first folder of the address. /_next/ holds the site's scripts and images.
robots.txt
Allow ShapBot
Allow it. It builds the index Parallel's answers are drawn from, so blocking it means those answers can't cite your pages.
User-agent: ShapBotAllow: /Needed only if a wider rule blocks it: robots.txt lets every bot in by default. A bot named in its own group ignores the User-agent: * group, so repeat your private paths there as Disallow lines. A block in your CDN or firewall has to be lifted there.
A rule only changes what the bot reads next. To see whether ShapBot reads your pages now, and which ones, track AI crawlers on your server or see the full AI crawler list.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
From Parallel's documentation, read on October 12, 2026.
ShapBot is the crawler Parallel uses to build the search index behind its web APIs, which AI agents and apps query.
Parallel says blocking it stops indexing, which may lower the site's visibility in its search APIs.
Check the visitor's IP against the list Parallel publishes. A request outside it isn't ShapBot, whatever its user agent says.
Allow it. It builds the index Parallel's answers are drawn from, so blocking it means those answers can't cite your pages.
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