The most active crawlers and bots on the web (2024)

Allowing web crawlers to scan your site is vital if you want your web pages to appear in Google, Bing and other search results. Here, we list the most common crawlers alongside their User Agents.

Tomas Trnka - 02 Mar 2023

12 min read

Updated: March 2023

Allowing web crawlers to scan your site is vital if you want your web pages to appear in Google, Bing and other search results. However, unwanted traffic spikes caused by non-human visitors can be costly in terms of bandwidth, CPU time, website stability, potentially leading to site outages.

The most active crawlers and bots on the web (1)

We've just updated our list of most active web crawlers, bots and spiders visiting websites, i.e. the most common instances of non-human traffic that we see in our data. We have also included their user-agents for reference. It's important to note that this list only includes bots which identify themselves; to learn about both self-declared and undeclared bots visiting websites, check out these articles Introduction to Bot Traffic — Part One of our Bot Analytics Series and Dark Traffic and Misrepresentation - Analyzing the Web Analysers (Part 2).

The most active crawlers and bots on the web (2)

Highlights from the article

  • User Agent Client-Hints supported only by few crawlers
  • Android dominates mobile crawling traffic
  • The HTTP libraries between the most active crawlers
  • Mid tier "devices" used for the crawling (mostly from 2016)
  • Almost no crawlers using tablet User-Agent

What are crawlers used for?

Web crawlers, also known as web spiders or bots, are automated programs used to browse the web and collect information about websites. They are most commonly used to index websites for search engines, but are also used for other tasks such as monitoring online content, validating HTML code, testing web performance and feeding language models.

Web crawler engine

The most common crawlers hitting any site are in-house scraping engines like Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo. Those engines include the ability to scale, sophisticated logic to crawl the site without causing any impact and to store and process massive data sets.

There are also many open source engines available with interesting features such as ability to simulate human behavior, rate control, distributed architecture or parsing of various document formats.

Crawlers list

Names of the most active crawlers, bots and other non-human traffic on the web as seen by our device detection Cloud Service. It is not to be interpreted as traffic directly due to the caching mechanism used by the Cloud Service clients which might favor services using various User-Agent versions. It’s a combination of normalized traffic and “popularity” of the crawlers within our user base.

Crawler NamePurpose / engineOfficial homepage
GooglebotSearch engine, checker and many other servicesGoogle crawlers
OkHttp libraryHTTP library for Android and Java applicationsOkHttp
Headless ChromeBrowser operated from command line / server environmentHeadless Chromium
Python HTTP libraryHTTP libraries like Requests, HTTPX or AIOHTTPPython Requests
cURLCommand line tool and a librarycURL
NessusVulnerability scannerNessus
FacebookSocial network / previewsFacebook Crawler
BingbotSearch engineBing crawlers
AhrefsBotSite and Marketing AuditAhrefsBot
SemrushBotSite AuditSemrushBot
Chrome-LighthouseBrowser addon, auditingLighthouse
AdbeatSite and Marketing AuditAdbeat
Comscore / ProximicOnline AdvertisingComscore Crawler
BytespiderSearch engine关于Bytespider
PetalBotSearch enginePetal Search

User-Agents of most active crawlers

OkHttp library

Not a crawler as such but the most spread HTTP library generating non-human traffic. Each request might have a different purpose as anybody can incorporate this library by their own means. The most popular variant seems to be version 4.9.2 and version 3.12.10 where the latter one is around two years old.

Popular User-Agent variantsTraffic proportion
okhttp/3.12.1040 %
okhttp/4.9.235 %

Google

There is no surprise that most crawling requests are coming from Google bots. That includes Googlebot, Google Ads bot, Google-Read-Aloud bot and others. Some of them even include two variants - desktop and mobile.

Beware that due to its popularity there might be other services pretending to be the Googlebot or there might be individuals trying to get past the paywalls.

Google User-Agent samplesService/Crawler
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)Googlebot
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.5359.130 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)Googlebot Mobile
AdsBot-Google (+http://www.google.com/adsbot.html)Google Ads Bot
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0; SM-G930V Build/NRD90M) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.125 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943)Google Read Aloud

Headless Chromium

Headless Chromium allows running Chromium in a headless/server environment. Expected use cases include loading web pages, extracting metadata (e.g., the DOM) and generating bitmaps from the page contents.

e.g. Used for the PageSpeed Insights service

Headless Chromium User-Agent samplesEnvironment
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/104.0.5112.101 Safari/537.36Linux
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/100.0.4896.127 Safari/537.36Windows

Facebook

The Facebook crawler which prefetches a page to generate a preview of the page which usually consist of title, short description and thumbnail image.

Facebook User-Agent sample
facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)

Python

Python User-Agent samplesLibrary
python-requests/2.28.1Requests
Python/3.8 aiohttp/3.8.1AIOHTTP
python-httpx/0.23.3XHHTP
Python-urllib/2.7python-urllib
python-urllib3/1.26.12python-urllib3

Nessus

Nessus User-Agent samples
Nessus
NESSUS::SOAP
Nessus/190402

cURL

Popular User-Agent variantsTraffic proportion
curl/7.58.021.7 %
curl/7.47.010.6 %
curl/7.68.010.2 %

Bing

Bing User-Agent samples
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/103.0.5060.134 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b

Others to note

User-Agent samplesCrawler
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 GLS/92.10.4949.50Google HTTP Java Client
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)SemrushBot
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)AhrefsBot
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0; Moto G (4)) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4590.2 Mobile Safari/537.36 Chrome-LighthouseChrome-Lighthouse
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)Bytespider
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_5) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.1 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)Applebot
Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4_(http://www.pingdom.com/)Pingdom
axios/0.27.2Axios
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)YandexBot

Crawlers by hardware type

There are many ways we can categorize non-human traffic. It can be by their purpose, it can be by their engine, as already mentioned above or it can be by how they advertise themselves to the websites.

Crawlers can use non-specific keywords in the User-Agent - having just their own name as the pivotal point - or they can pretend to come from a specific hardware like desktop, mobile phone or tablet.

The most active crawlers and bots on the web (3)

Client-Hints support

Even though it is primarily Google who wants to deprecate and freeze User-Agent their Googlebots fleet was left behind. The mobile bots still rely on the classic User-Agent parsing without any “sec-ch” headers. We tried to reach out and asked about crawler’s Client-Hints support but there was no reply.

So far it’s only such non-human traffic which functions as a proxy, like Amazon CloudFront, or using a real Chrome engine, like Chrome-Lighthouse, HeadlessChrome or SpeedCurve, which support Client-Hints. There is zero Client Hints support from all the rest.

Amazon CloudFront HTTP headers sample

sec-ch-ua: "Not_A Brand";v="99", "Google Chrome";v="109", "Chromium";v="109"sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"user-agent: Amazon CloudFront

Chrome-LightHouse HTTP headers sample

sec-ch-ua: "Chromium";v="98", "Google Chrome";v="98", "Lighthouse";v="9.6.6"sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0; Moto G (4)) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4590.2 Mobile Safari/537.36 Chrome-Lighthouse

SpeedCurve (PTST) HTTP headers sample

sec-ch-ua: " Not A;Brand";v="99", "Chromium";v="109", "Google Chrome";v="109"sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?1sec-ch-ua-platform: "Android"user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; Moto G (4)) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 PTST/230125.191541

Headless Chrome HTTP headers sample

sec-ch-ua:sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0sec-ch-ua-platform:user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/104.0.5112.101 Safari/537.36

Mobile crawlers

Here is a special breakdown of a traffic where crawlers are pretending to be a specific mobile device or a tablet. Overall it’s the Android models that dominate crawling part of the traffic, regardless of Apple's policy of the model obfuscation in the User-Agent.

The most active crawlers and bots on the web (4)

Reference mobile phones

There seems to be no real demand to use the most up-to-date mobile devices. All the crawler User-Agents have been picked and set many years ago and it’s working as expected. Pretty well representing the mid tier mobile device category.

Let’s look at most popular devices to see what mobile devices have been picked by crawling giants and for what functionality, image size and screen dimensions optimize non-human traffic.

Google (LG) Nexus 5X

  • Proportion of reference traffic: 30 % - 33 %
  • Reported Android version: 6.0.1
  • Year released: 2015
  • Viewport width: 412 (1080 physical)
  • Diagonal screen size: 5.2”
  • Processor: Hexa-core (1.8 GHz, 1.4 GHz)
  • Used by Google

Google Nexus 5X can be called a reference Android mobile phone. Decent physical screen resolution supporting Full HD, six cores and 5.2” diagonal screen size. Along with the Apple iPhone it is accounting for the majority of the crawlers traffic pretending to be a mobile device.

Heavily used by various Google crawling services or by other crawlers pretending to be Google. The Android version seems to be fixed at 6.0.1 while Chrome browser versions are getting updated, at least for the official Google bot User-Agents.

Nexus 5X crawler User-Agent samples
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/108.0.5359.130 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.5414.74 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; AdsBot-Google-Mobile; +http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Safety; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Apple iPhone

  • Proportion of reference traffic: 24 % - 26 %
  • Reported iOS version: 6.0 - current
  • Year released: 2009 (iPhone 3GS) - current
  • Viewport width: Anything from 320 to 430 (640 to 1290 physical)
  • Diagonal screen size: Anything from 3.5” to 6.69”
  • Processor: Anything from Single-core (600 MHz) to Hexa-core (3.46 GHz)
  • Used by Google, Semrush, Bing, Yisou, Baidu and many others

Despite the iPhone User-Agent being used the most by the mobile crawlers it’s actually the most difficult one for the content optimisation. Lack of a specific model makes the optimization very hard due to the performance and screen resolution quite big differences across the whole iPhone product line.

Apple iPhone crawler User-Agent samples
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_7_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.1.2 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 (compatible; AdsBot-Google-Mobile; +http://www.google.com/mobile/adsbot.html)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25 (compatible; SiteAuditBot/0.97; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)

Verizon (Samsung) Galaxy S7

  • Proportion of reference traffic: 12 % - 13 %
  • Reported Android version: 7.0
  • Year released: 2016
  • Viewport width: 360 (1440 physical)
  • Diagonal screen size: 5.1”
  • Processor: Quad-core (2.16 GHz, 2.15 GHz)
  • Used by Google

The Google Read Aloud service seems to be popular enough to trigger many requests pretending to be a Verizon Galaxy S7 mobile device and end up as the third most popular crawler mobile device across the Cloud Service user base.

There seem to be only single User-Agent in-use with fixed Android version and also fixed Chrome browser version. Either this service “crawling” part is working seamlessly and doesn’t require any updates or it’s not in the spotlight as it is not directly generating any revenue.

Why Google is using a branded Verizon model variant (SM-G930V) and not a “generic” unlocked model version (SM-G930U) is not fully clear.

Galaxy S7 User-Agent sample
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0; SM-G930V Build/NRD90M) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/59.0.3071.125 Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-Read-Aloud; +https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1061943)

Motorola (Lenovo) Moto G4

  • Proportion of reference traffic: 9 % - 11 %
  • Reported Android versions: 6.0.1, 7.0 and 8.1.0
  • Year released: 2016
  • Viewport width: 360 (1080 physical)
  • Diagonal screen size: 5.5”
  • Processor: Octa-core (1.5 GHz, 1.2 GHz)
  • Used by Chrome-Lighthouse and SpeedCurve WebPage Test

The Moto G4 is used as a default mobile device for the Chrome Lighthouse plugin and also used by SpeedCurve tests, being the fourth most popular mobile device in the crawling space.

Moto G4 User-Agent samples
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0; Moto G (4)) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4590.2 Mobile Safari/537.36 Chrome-Lighthouse
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; Moto G (4)) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/101.0.4951.64 Mobile Safari/537.36 PTST/220513.185401

Google (LG) Nexus 5

  • Proportion of reference traffic: 4 % - 7 %
  • Reported Android versions: 4.2.1
  • Year released: 2013
  • Viewport width: 360 (1080 physical)
  • Diagonal screen size: 5”
  • Processor: Quad-core (2.3 GHz)
  • Used by Google

Mainly used by Google Web Light service which is used to optimize web pages for users with slower internet connections. Using quite old Android (4.2.1) and Chrome versions (38.x). The use of this crawler / service seems to be continuously quite decreasing over time.

Nexus 5 User-Agent samples
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.2.1; en-us; Nexus 5 Build/JOP40D) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko; googleweblight) Chrome/38.0.1025.166 Mobile Safari/535.19
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3464.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 Chrome-Lighthouse

Generic Android

  • Proportion of reference traffic: 6 % - 7 %
  • Reported Android versions: 5.0 and 7.0
  • Year released: unknown
  • Viewport width: unknown
  • Diagonal screen size: unknown
  • Processor: unknown
  • Used by PetalBot and Bytespider

There are also some crawlers using generic Android User-Agents without any model information. This might once become a standard if the adoption of Client Hints properly kicks off. You can find more information about the Client Hints in our Resources section.

Android User-Agent samples
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Bytespider; https://zhanzhang.toutiao.com/)

Reference tablets

For a given period there was a very limited use of tablet User-Agents by crawlers (below 1 % of all crawlers traffic) and none of it by the big search engine players like Google or Bing.

Apple iPad

Apple iPad User-Agent samples
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 12_4_1 like Mac OS X) adbeat.com/policy AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.1.2 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 11_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.1.34 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Mobile/15A5341f Safari/604.1 (compatible; woorankreview/2.0; +https://www.woorank.com/)

Various Android tablets

Android tablet User-Agent samples
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0; SM-T827R4 Build/NRD90M) adbeat.com/policy AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.116 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0.2; SAMSUNG SM-T550 Build/LRX22G) adbeat.com/policy AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) SamsungBrowser/3.3 Chrome/38.0.2125.102 Safari/537.36
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; SGP771 Build/32.2.A.0.253; wv) adbeat.com/policy AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/52.0.2743.98 Safari/537.36

Web crawlers detection

With DeviceAtlas you can identify non-human traffic (robots, crawlers, checkers, download agents, spam harvesters and feed readers) in real-time. You can then decide how to act on this information, whether to block all undesired bots at the door, or just treat them in a different way to legitimate human visitors.

Read more about bot detection and how it can help your business to:

  • Limit Ad-fraud
  • Protect your site

We also have some handy resource lists such as a list of User Agents for the most popular smartphones and devices and the most common mobile browsers across 35 countries.

The most active crawlers and bots on the web (2024)

FAQs

The most active crawlers and bots on the web? ›

The most active crawler is Googlebot

Do web crawlers still exist? ›

WebCrawler is a search engine, and one of the oldest surviving search engines on the web today.

What is the best web crawler? ›

20 Best Web Crawling Tools & Software in 2024
ToolBest forPrice
Apache NutchWriting scalable web crawlersFree web crawling tool
Outwit HubSmall projectsFree version available. Paid plan starts at $110/month
Cyotek WebCopyUsers with a tight budgetFree web crawling tool
WebSPHINXBrowsing offlineFree web crawling tool
16 more rows
Jan 16, 2023

What web crawler does Google use? ›

"Crawler" (sometimes also called a "robot" or "spider") is a generic term for any program that is used to automatically discover and scan websites by following links from one web page to another. Google's main crawler used for Google Search is called Googlebot.

What is also known as spiders crawlers and web bots? ›

A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering).

Are web crawlers illegal? ›

While it's legal to collect publicly available information from public websites, web scraping activities may violate fair use laws, privacy laws, and copyright laws, or constitute a breach of contract. At the time of writing, no specific laws prohibit web scraping in the United States, Europe, or Asia.

What is hidden web crawler? ›

The Hidden web refers to the collection of Web data which can be accessed by the crawler only through an interaction with the Web-based search form and not simply by traversing hyperlinks.

What is dark web crawler? ›

Dark web crawlers are specialized software tools designed to index and collect information from hidden websites and services not accessible through conventional search engines.

Is A web crawler a bot? ›

A web crawler, or spider, is a type of bot that is typically operated by search engines like Google and Bing. Their purpose is to index the content of websites all across the Internet so that those websites can appear in search engine results.

How do I find a web crawler? ›

How Is a Crawler Detected? Web crawlers typically use the User-Agent header in an HTTP request to identify themselves to a web server. This header is what identifies the browser used to access a site. It can be any text but commonly includes the browser type and version number.

How do I access the Googlebot? ›

For a user to emulate Googlebot with a Chrome extension in the browser, you'll need to use a tool such as the “User-Agent Switcher Extension for Chrome”. This extension is a type of software that allows you to change the user agent of your Chrome browser to any fake user agent you choose, including Google bots.

How to identify Google bots? ›

The best way to verify that a request actually comes from Googlebot is to use a reverse DNS lookup on the source IP of the request, or to match the source IP against the Googlebot IP ranges.

How do I access Google crawler? ›

Click Crawl and Index > Crawler Access. Under Users and Passwords for Crawling, enter the URLs Matching Pattern, the username, the domain (if using NTLM), and the password and confirmation. If you need more rows for additional patterns, click the Add More Rows button.

How to create a web crawler? ›

How to Build a Web Crawler
  1. Step 1: Set Up the Environment. On how to build a web crawler, the first step is to ensure you have Python installed on your system. ...
  2. Step 2: Import Libraries. ...
  3. Step 3: Define the Crawler Function. ...
  4. Step 4: Test the Crawler. ...
  5. Step 5: Run the Crawler.

What is the first web crawler? ›

The first web crawler, named World Wide Web Wanderer, was developed by Matthew Gray in 1993. Its purpose was to measure the size of the web by counting the number of accessible web pages. Shortly after, the first popular search engine, WebCrawler, was launched.

Are bots crawlers or scripts? ›

Bot (robot, spider, crawler)

A bot is a software application or script which is programmed to carry out a series of tasks automatically over the internet. The most common example are bots created by search engines that crawl websites on the world wide web, fetching and indexing the content on web pages.

What happened to WebCrawler? ›

But WebCrawler was sold less than two years later in 1997 to Excite, which eventually went bankrupt. WebCrawler has changed hands several times and continues to exist today, making it one of the oldest surviving search engines.

How much of the internet has Google crawled? ›

Despite Google search's immense index, sources generally assume that Google is only indexing less than 5% of the total Internet, with the rest belonging to the deep web, inaccessible through its search tools. In 2012, Google changed its search indexing tools to demote sites that had been accused of piracy.

Are web crawlers and spiders the same? ›

A web crawler, or spider, is a type of bot that is typically operated by search engines like Google and Bing. Their purpose is to index the content of websites all across the Internet so that those websites can appear in search engine results.

Why do websites block web crawlers? ›

Bots can be used for malicious purposes such as stealing data and scraping content from websites. As a result, website owners may find it necessary to block crawlers from their websites in order to protect their information and keep their site secure.

References

Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Delena Feil

Last Updated:

Views: 5573

Rating: 4.4 / 5 (45 voted)

Reviews: 92% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Delena Feil

Birthday: 1998-08-29

Address: 747 Lubowitz Run, Sidmouth, HI 90646-5543

Phone: +99513241752844

Job: Design Supervisor

Hobby: Digital arts, Lacemaking, Air sports, Running, Scouting, Shooting, Puzzles

Introduction: My name is Delena Feil, I am a clean, splendid, calm, fancy, jolly, bright, faithful person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.