🤖 Overview

BunnySlippers is a legitimate web crawler operated by Bunny.net, the company behind BunnyCDN and Bunny Search. First publicly documented in 2020, its primary purpose is to collect publicly accessible web content for indexing in Bunny Search — a privacy-focused, ad-free search engine — and to monitor CDN performance metrics for Bunny.net’s infrastructure. The bot is explicitly described as a “courteous crawler” in Bunny’s official documentation, designed to reduce load on origin servers.

🌐 Technical Behavior

BunnySlippers performs HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 requests using persistent connections. The default crawl rate is approximately one request per second per domain, with configurable delays via the robots.txt Crawl-Delay directive. Requests originate from IP addresses within Bunny.net’s owned ASN AS54825, with ranges like 185.180.12.0/22 and 195.12.48.0/22 (documented on Bunny’s support page and WHOIS records). The crawler respects the If-Modified-Since header to avoid re-downloading unchanged content and uses Accept-Encoding: gzip to reduce bandwidth. It does not execute JavaScript or load images beyond the first page, focusing on textual content needed for search indexing.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Bunny.net explicitly states that BunnySlippers fully honors all Disallow and Crawl-Delay directives in robots.txt. This is verified in their official “Crawlers & Bots” documentation (bunny.net/docs/crawlers). The bot also respects the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header for individual pages, including noindex and nofollow values. No evidence of ignoring restrictions has been reported in security advisories or community forums.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is BunnySlippers (sometimes suffixed with version, e.g., BunnySlippers/1.0). Secondary identifiers include the From header set to [email protected] and a User-Agent field that may also appear as BunnyCDN-Crawler for CDN monitoring variants. Reverse DNS lookups resolve to hostnames ending in .bunny.net. No other common User-Agent spoofing has been observed.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for Bunny Search indexing (page titles, meta descriptions, and visible text) and for Bunny.net’s CDN analytics — such as cache-hit ratios, origin response times, and TLS certificate validation logs. Bunny.net’s privacy policy states that “no personal data is stored” from crawled pages; only aggregated, anonymized metrics are retained. The index powers their free search engine and is not used for AI model training or advertising profiling.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although BunnySlippers is well-behaved, it may still overwhelm smaller servers when crawling large sites or during initial indexing bursts. Rate limiting (e.g., blocking after 10 requests per second from its IP ranges) is recommended to protect application resources while still allowing legitimate crawling; this is standard practice for all aggressive-but-legitimate bots documented on OWASP’s Bot Protection guidelines.

ⓘ 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.