If you notice a sudden and consistent drop in Altmetric attention for your publications hosted on your journal website, it may be due to your platform's security system inadvertently blocking our tracking crawler. This blockage prevents our system from accessing and collecting the necessary information to link the mention to the correct publication.
In most cases, customers first notice this when their publications stop receiving new mentions for several days in a row, even for pages that would usually receive attention.
Whitelisting our IP Range
To restore seamless Altmetric tracking, your website administrator needs to whitelist a specific range of our IP addresses. This action allows our tracking bot, or "crawler," to reliably access your pages.
By whitelisting our IPs, you ensure that your security system correctly identifies our bot as a benign and essential tool for tracking attention, rather than a threat.
What our crawler does and when it runs
The Altmetric crawler is a key part of our tracking process. It works as follows:
It navigates to your publication's specific webpage (e.g., the article landing page).
It looks for metadata within that page (such as a DOI, PubMed ID, or other identifiers).
It uses this metadata to match the page to the relevant online mentions we've collected (like posts on social media, news stories, blog posts, etc.), and ensures the Altmetric data is correctly attributed and updated.
Crawling frequency
Our crawler operates on an ad hoc basis to minimize impact on your server resources:
When a new mention is found (e.g., a link to your content is posted on a site like Bluesky or X/Twitter) and we haven't seen that specific page before, we will crawl the page to gather the necessary metadata.
If we have already successfully processed the page and its metadata, we generally will not need to crawl it again. We rarely reprocess all links in a given time period; our standard behavior is to crawl only when a new link is encountered.
Please contact the Altmetric support for the specific range of IP addresses that need to be whitelisted.