🤖 Overview

Instabid is a web crawler operated by Instabid Inc., a company specializing in real‑time auction aggregation and dynamic pricing analytics. First identified in late 2022, the bot systematically collects publicly available product listings, bidding histories, and price data from online auction platforms such as eBay, Catawiki, and smaller niche marketplaces. Its primary purpose is to feed the Instabid service—a subscription‑based dashboard that provides users with instant alerts, historical price trends, and automated bidding recommendations.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Instabid employs a multi‑threaded, distributed crawl architecture that issues requests with a median frequency of one request every 2–4 seconds per domain, though bursts of up to 10 requests per second have been observed during peak market hours. The bot rotates through a pool of approximately 2,000 IPv4 addresses drawn from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform, with occasional appearances from DigitalOcean and Linode ranges. All traffic uses HTTPS/1.1 with the TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 protocol, and it includes a custom Via header containing “Instabid-Gateway”. Requests are sent with a standard User‑Agent string, but the crawler also sends a X‑Instabid‑Crawl‑ID header that identifies individual crawl sessions. Official documentation (available at docs.instabid.com/crawler) states the bot only requests HTML pages and JSON endpoints labeled as public; it does not attempt to access authenticated or obfuscated resources.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Instabid’s published crawler policy, the bot fully honors Disallow directives found in robots.txt. The crawler checks for the file at the root of each domain before every crawl cycle and re‑validates it every 24 hours. Instabid provides a dedicated support channel for webmasters to report missed directives, and the company claims that over 99.8% of all disallowed paths are respected based on internal audit logs. A 2023 study by the University of Amsterdam verified that Instabid’s crawler does not access blocked resources when tested against a controlled honeypot.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identification string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Instabid/1.0; +http://www.instabid.com/crawler), but the bot also uses a secondary user agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0 when mimicking organic traffic for certain AJAX endpoints. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent request pattern: first a HEAD request, followed by a GET for the full page, and finally a GET for any JSON‑Ld script tag on the page. The presence of the X‑Instabid‑Crawl‑ID header (a 32‑character hex string) is the most reliable indicator; many web application firewalls (WAFs) add this header to blocklists when aggressive crawling is detected.

📊 Data Usage

Instabid collects product titles, prices, auction end times, and bid counts from each visited page. This data is ingested into the Instabid platform to power a real‑time price comparison engine, generate historical charts, and train proprietary machine‑learning models that forecast optimal bid prices. The company explicitly states that it does not store full page content, images, or personal user information beyond what is necessary for auction tracking. All aggregated data is licensed to subscribers under a commercial agreement; individual website owners may request full deletion of their site’s data via a form on instabid.com/privacy.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Instabid is rate‑limited because its rapid, multi‑IP crawling can saturate shared server resources or trigger auto‑scaling costs for smaller websites. The recommended policy is a threshold‑based block (e.g., 50 requests per minute per IP range) that still allows the bot’s essential data collection while preventing service degradation. Many site operators also enforce a Disallow on the /category and /search paths to reduce redundant requests without breaking the bot’s core functionality.

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