🤖 Overview

ipadd bot is an automated web crawler operated by ipadd.com, a service specializing in IP address geolocation and network intelligence. The bot primarily collects publicly available IP address metadata, including geolocation coordinates, ISP details, and reverse DNS information, to populate and update the ipadd.com database. This database is used by network administrators, cybersecurity researchers, and analytics platforms requiring accurate IP-to-location mappings. The bot was first documented in publicly available robots.txt archives as early as 2019, and its operations are aligned with standard web crawling best practices under the IP address information ecosystem.

🌐 Technical Behavior

ipadd bot performs systematic crawls targeting web pages that display IP address information, such as whois lookup results, IPv4/IPv6 allocation tables, and regional internet registry pages. It employs a request rate of approximately 10–20 requests per minute per source domain, which is moderate compared to major search engine crawlers. The bot uses the HTTP/1.1 protocol with a default User-Agent string of ipadd bot/1.0 (as verified in official ipadd.com documentation). Its IP ranges are primarily drawn from AWS EC2 and Google Cloud Platform blocks, with specific subnets such as 35.184.0.0/14 and 52.0.0.0/8 being observed in server logs. The crawler prioritizes pages with high IP density, using a breadth-first traversal algorithm and respecting a polite crawl delay of 2 seconds between successive requests when no explicit Crawl-Delay is set in robots.txt. The bot does not execute JavaScript or follow redirects that lead to login-required pages, focusing solely on static HTML content.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

ipadd bot fully honors Disallow directives as documented in the official ipadd.com policy page. It checks the /robots.txt file before each crawl session and immediately stops accessing any paths listed under the User-agent: ipadd bot rule. Public audits by website operators have confirmed that the bot does not ignore Disallow rules, even on misconfigured servers, and it also respects Crawl-Delay directives. A 2023 analysis by a major hosting provider found no violations of robots.txt by this bot across millions of crawl events.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identifying User-Agent string is ipadd bot/1.0, with occasional variants like ipadd-bot/1.0 (reported on feedback sites). No custom HTTP headers beyond standard ones are used, but the bot always includes a Referer header pointing to https://ipadd.com. Server logs show a characteristic pattern of sequential page requests with no referrer spam. Additionally, reverse DNS lookups on its source IPs often resolve to hostnames containing .ipadd.com. or .compute.amazonaws.com. The bot’s request frequency remains consistent within a session, making it distinguishable from human traffic via behavioral fingerprints like low entropy in request intervals.

📊 Data Usage

Collected IP metadata feeds into the ipadd.com public API and database, which provides free and paid geolocation services. The data is also used for internal analytics on IP allocation trends, network routing optimization, and educational research. ipadd.com does not sell raw logs to third parties and anonymizes all data after aggregation. The bot does not capture personally identifiable information (PII) from IP addresses themselves, as the service focuses on network-level data.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

While ipadd bot is legitimate and rate-limited by design, web administrators may impose additional throttling via mod_ratelimit or fail2ban rules if the bot exceeds 30 requests per second on a single IP. This precaution is recommended because the bot’s moderate crawl can still strain low‑bandwidth sites, and threshold‑based blocking preserves server resources for human users.

ⓘ 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.