Dataset builders

Spider

Spider is a bot that crawls pages into a dataset that may be reused or shared with third parties, and its operator has not been publicly identified. The token has been seen in server logs, but no operator has published documentation for it. No IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine and a robots.txt rule alone will not stop a forgery.

Operator unknownClaim onlyrobots.txt:No policy

Live check

Verify an IP that claimed to be Spider

No operator check exists for Spider. This still shows what the address really is.

Reference

Spider at a glance

Reference data for the Spider crawler
User agentSpider

Token only: match on the substring.

OperatorNot publicly identified
PurposeDataset builders
Respects robots.txtNo policy
Verification methodClaim onlyNone published, user agent only

No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof.

Crawl patternNot published
Robots.txt tokensSpider
Operator documentationNone published

No operator documents this token. Everything here comes from the string and the traffic.

robots.txt

Allow or block Spider

Paste one at the root of your domain. Rules are per token.

Block Spider
User-agent: Spider
Disallow: /
Allow Spider
User-agent: Spider
Allow: /
Allow, except the pages you never want quoted
User-agent: Spider
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /search

Edit the Disallow paths to match your own URLs.

What blocking actually costs you

Blocking Spider keeps your pages out of the datasets it builds from future crawls. It does not remove anything collected earlier, and how each operator uses or shares its data varies, so check their policy.

Build a file for every crawler

FAQ

Spider questions

What is Spider?

Spider is a bot that crawls pages into a dataset that may be reused or shared with third parties, and its operator has not been publicly identified. The token has been seen in server logs, but no operator has published documentation for it. No IP range list or reverse-DNS convention is published, so a request carrying this user agent cannot be proven genuine and a robots.txt rule alone will not stop a forgery.

Does Spider respect robots.txt?

Not documented. No operator statement says whether Spider reads robots.txt, so add the rule but verify in your logs that the requests actually stop.

How do I verify a request really came from Spider?

You cannot, at least not from the request itself. No IP range file and no reverse-DNS convention have been published for this agent. The user-agent string is the only signal, and any client can send it, so treat a match as a claim rather than proof. Compare the source IP against hosting and datacenter ranges instead, and rate limit anything that behaves like a crawler.

How do I block Spider?

Add the Spider token to robots.txt with Disallow: /. If the crawler ignores robots.txt, match the user agent at your CDN or reverse proxy and return 403 there instead.

Will blocking Spider hurt my search rankings?

Blocking Spider keeps your pages out of the datasets it builds from future crawls. It does not remove anything collected earlier, and how each operator uses or shares its data varies, so check their policy.

    Spider: User Agent, IP Verification & robots.txt | IPScanner