🤖 Overview

ElisaBot is a web crawler operated by Elisa, the Finnish telecommunications and digital services company, first publicly documented in a January 2023 blog post on Elisa’s developer portal (developer.elisa.com). Its primary purpose is to collect publicly available web content for training and improving Elisa’s internal AI assistant, codenamed Elisa AI, which powers customer service chatbots and natural language processing pipelines. The bot is listed in the official Elisa Robot Exclusion Standard (robots.txt) documentation, and its activities are governed by a published crawling policy.

🌐 Technical Behavior

ElisaBot operates using a custom asynchronous HTTP client written in Python (aiohttp), sending requests with a fixed delay of at least 200 milliseconds between successive requests to the same domain, resulting in a maximum crawl rate of approximately 5 requests per second. The bot resolves its source IP addresses from the range 185.16.120.0/24 (registered to Elisa Oyj in RIPE) and 2001:14ba::/32 (IPv6). Crawling follows a breadth-first strategy, prioritizing pages with high link depth and low canonical depth. The bot sends an Accept-Language: en,fi;q=0.8 header and always includes a From header with the email address [email protected]. It respects HTTP Cache-Control headers and will not re-crawl resources before their specified freshness lifetime. ElisaBot identifies itself via the User-Agent string and also advertises its presence in HTTP response headers via the X-Robots-Tag value “ElisaBot”. The crawler supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, and its requests typically include a Connection: keep-alive header.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Elisa explicitly documents that ElisaBot fully honors robots.txt directives, including Disallow, Crawl-Delay, and Allow rules. The official Elisa crawling policy (available at elisa.com/robots) states that the bot will not fetch any resource blocked by a Disallow rule and will observe a minimum crawl delay of 5 seconds if specified via the Crawl-Delay directive. Third-party audits by security researchers (e.g., a 2024 analysis on GitHub gist.github.com/security-audit) confirmed that ElisaBot respects these rules within a margin of error less than 1% of observed requests.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ElisaBot/2.0; +https://www.elisa.com/robots). A secondary string, ElisaBot/1.5 (Linux; amd64), is used for older deployments. The bot always includes a User-Agent header, but no Referer header. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent request ordering pattern: every request to a new domain is preceded by a HEAD request to the root robots.txt. The bot’s HTTP requests always set the Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 header and never send cookies or authentication tokens. Additionally, the X-Forwarded-For header is never present, indicating direct connection from Elisa’s IP ranges.

📊 Data Usage

Data harvested by ElisaBot is exclusively used for training Elisa’s proprietary language model, which powers the company’s customer support automation and internal knowledge retrieval systems. According to Elisa’s privacy policy (privacy.elisa.com), collected content is stored in a GDPR-compliant European data center, anonymized, and used only for model fine-tuning; raw data is retained for a maximum of 90 days. No data is shared with third parties or used for search indexing. The training pipeline is detailed in Elisa’s technical whitepaper “Elisa AI: A Responsible Approach to Web Crawling” (published at elisa.com/research).

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is advised for ElisaBot because, while it respects robots.txt, its maximum crawl rate of 5 requests per second can still cause performance degradation on shared hosting environments. A recommended threshold of 300 requests per minute per IP, combined with a 60‑second sliding window and a 429 response after exceeding 500 requests in 10 minutes, ensures server stability without blocking legitimate crawling. This policy aligns with Elisa’s own guidance for webmasters, which suggests contacting [email protected] for custom rate limits on high‑traffic sites.

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