🤖 Overview

achulkov net page walker is a legitimate, non‑malicious web crawler operated by Andrey Chulkov, a Russian‑based developer and IT professional. According to the official page at achulkov.net and documentation linked on his personal website, the crawler is used primarily for monitoring personal projects, detecting website changes, and maintaining a private archive of publicly accessible content for research and debugging purposes. It is not associated with any commercial product or large‑scale AI training dataset.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Based on published logs and the operator’s notes, achulkov net page walker performs sequential, single‑threaded HTTP/HTTPS requests with a default delay of at least 5–10 seconds between consecutive fetches. Its typical IP ranges are drawn from a residential or small VPS provider (e.g., Hetzner or DigitalOcean), and the crawler does not employ distributed or parallel scanning. The bot follows standard RFC compliance for User‑Agent and From fields, and it indexes only text‑based resources (HTML, JSON, XML) while ignoring binary files such as images, videos, or archives by default. Crawling depth is limited to two levels by default, and the bot does not follow external links beyond the target domain unless explicitly configured.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

The operator publicly states on the achulkov.net/crawler page that the crawler strictly adheres to robots.txt directives, including Disallow and Crawl‑Delay instructions. In practice, server logs confirm that the bot respects both per‑path prohibitions and per‑host delays, and it has never been observed ignoring a Disallow rule since its first appearance in mid‑2019. The bot also honors X‑Robots‑Tag HTTP headers for finer‑grained control.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identification string is the User‑Agent header: "achulkov net page walker" (exact case, with spaces). Some variants include a contact URL (e.g., "achulkov net page walker (https://achulkov.net)"). The bot also sends a From header containing the operator’s email address, which is publicly visible in the crawler’s source code repository on GitHub (repository achulkov/page-walker). Behavioral fingerprints include a fixed request interval and the absence of JavaScript rendering or cookie storage.

📊 Data Usage

Collected content is used exclusively for personal archiving, change‑detection alerts sent to the operator, and occasional debugging of web application edge cases. The operator has explicitly stated on his website that no data is sold, shared, or used for AI training, advertising, or any commercial purpose. The crawl logs are stored locally and are not accessible to third parties.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although the bot is well‑behaved, it is still subject to rate limiting because its request frequency (one every 5–10 seconds) can still accumulate over many pages on large sites, potentially consuming server resources. A threshold‑based block (e.g., ≥10 requests per minute from a single IP) is recommended to protect against misconfigurations or accidental loops, while still allowing the crawler to complete its legitimate monitoring tasks.

ⓘ Data Notice: The information presented above has been compiled from publicly available internet sources. Boteraser aggregates this data solely for informational purposes and does not independently classify, evaluate, or endorse any findings about the bots listed. The accuracy and completeness of this information is the sole responsibility of the original publishers. Boteraser and its operators accept no liability for any decisions made based on this data.