🤖 Overview

kiwistatus is a legitimate web crawler operated by Kiwi.com (formerly Skypicker), a Czech online travel agency founded in 2012. Its sole purpose is to collect real-time flight status information from airline and airport websites, aggregating departure and arrival data to power the Kiwi.com platform’s flight tracking and search features. Unlike general‑purpose search engine bots, this agent is narrowly focused on updating the company’s internal status database used by millions of travelers worldwide.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The bot systematically crawls a curated list of sources including individual airline schedule pages (e.g., Lufthansa, Ryanair) and airport flight information display systems (e.g., London Heathrow’s live feed). Requests are sent over HTTP/1.1 with a rate of approximately one request every 10–30 seconds per target domain, as documented in Kiwi.com’s developer guidelines (available at developers.kiwi.com/crawlers). IP ranges are drawn from the company’s announced ASN (AS202071) and are limited to a small set of static addresses (e.g., 185.18.48.0/24) to allow easy whitelisting. The bot follows HTTP redirects (up to 3 hops) and requests gzip compression to minimize bandwidth. It does not execute JavaScript or parse dynamic content, relying on static HTML or structured data feeds (e.g., JSON endpoints).

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Kiwi.com publicly states that kiwistatus honors the robots.txt file of every target site. Internal audit logs (cited in their operational transparency report, v2.1, 2023) confirm that the bot reads the file at the beginning of each crawl session and caches it for at least one hour. If a Disallow directive is encountered for a path, the bot skips that path entirely and does not attempt any bypass.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The identifying User‑Agent string is kiwistatus/1.0 (or kiwistatus/2.0 as of March 2024). The bot also sends a custom header X-Source: kiwi-status-crawler. Behavioral fingerprints include a low request frequency, a preference for TLS 1.2/1.3, and the absence of referrer headers. The bot’s IP addresses are consistently registered under Kiwi.com’s ASN and resolve to the hostname crawler.kiwi.com.

📊 Data Usage

All collected flight status data (e.g., on‑time, delayed, cancelled) is fed exclusively into Kiwi.com’s real‑time travel search engine and mobile app. The data is not used for AI model training, third‑party analytics, or advertisements. Kiwi.com stores the aggregated statuses for up to 48 hours to support historical trend analysis on their platform.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because kiwistatus can still place noticeable load on smaller airline websites if it scans multiple endpoints concurrently, web administrators are advised to rate‑limit the bot using a threshold of 10 requests per minute per IP. This policy balances the legitimate need for timely flight status updates with the protection of origin servers from avoidable traffic spikes.

ⓘ 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.