🤖 Overview

cafi is a legitimate web crawler operated by CafeMedia, a digital media and advertising technology company headquartered in New York, USA. Its primary purpose is to crawl publicly accessible web pages to collect data for advertising measurement, audience analytics, and content optimization across CafeMedia’s publisher network. The data feeds into CafeMedia’s proprietary analytics and ad-serving platform, used by thousands of publisher sites to understand user behavior and ad performance. CafeMedia publicly documents this crawler at their official crawler information page: https://cafemedia.com/crawler.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The cafi crawler employs a systematic crawling pattern, typically sending HTTP GET requests at a moderate rate of 2–5 requests per minute per host to avoid overwhelming servers. It supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS protocols and accepts gzip-compressed responses. Its IP ranges are dynamically allocated from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, with the exact ranges published in CafeMedia’s official documentation. The bot identifies itself via the User-Agent string cafi (case-insensitive) and includes a From header or comment linking to its documentation. It does not execute JavaScript or load external resources like images or CSS, focusing solely on raw HTML content.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to CafeMedia’s official documentation, the cafi crawler fully honors the robots.txt file and any meta robots tags. It checks for disallowed paths at the beginning of each crawling session and respects Crawl-Delay directives if present. There are no documented instances of non-compliance; webmasters can block it entirely by adding User-agent: cafi and Disallow: / to their robots.txt.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary detection method is the User-Agent string, which is simply cafi (often followed by a version comment such as cafi/1.0). It may also appear as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; cafi/1.0; +https://cafemedia.com/crawler). Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent, low-frequency request pattern and the absence of JavaScript execution. The bot does not attempt to mask its identity or spoof other user agents, making it easily identifiable in server logs.

📊 Data Usage

Data collected by cafi is used exclusively for advertising analytics and content performance measurement. CafeMedia aggregates the information to provide publishers with insights on ad impressions, click-through rates, viewability, and audience engagement. This data is not used for AI model training or for general web search indexing. It is stored in anonymized and aggregated form, in compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is recommended for the cafi crawler because, while it is designed to be respectful, unconstrained crawling can still cause performance degradation on resource-constrained servers. Threshold-based blocking, such as limiting the bot to 10 requests per minute per IP, ensures fair resource allocation while still allowing legitimate analytics data collection. CafeMedia itself advises publishers to implement rate limits if the crawler’s activity becomes excessive.

ⓘ 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.