🤖 Overview

Knowledge.com is a web crawler operated by Knowledge Inc., a data aggregation company that launched the bot in 2022 to index publicly accessible web content for its proprietary Knowledge Graph platform. This platform supplies training data for large language models and knowledge base enrichment tools sold to enterprises.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler uses a distributed architecture on Amazon Web Services (us-east-1, eu-west-1) and Google Cloud Platform (us-central1), sending HTTP/2 requests with a default 0.5-second delay per page. It recursively follows internal links up to depth 10, caches DNS for 24 hours, and includes a custom header X-Knowledge-Source: web. Official documentation at knowledge.com/robots confirms it respects robots.txt but may ignore Crawl-Delay when operating in “research” mode, accelerating to 0.1-second intervals.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to knowledge.com/robots, the bot fully honors Disallow directives and reads robots.txt at crawl start, caching results for 6 hours. It does not support Allow overrides, and tests by the community (GitHub issue #42 on knowledge/robots) indicate it re-crawls pages if the Crawl-Delay is under 1 second.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent is Knowledge.com/1.0 (compatible; +https://knowledge.com/bot), with alternatives KnowledgeBot/1.0 and Knowledge-Research/2.0. Behavioral fingerprints include sequential requests lacking referrer headers and X-Forwarded-For patterns matching AWS internal IPs. The bot does not set or accept cookies.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data feeds into the Knowledge Graph database, used for AI model training, SEO analytics, and enterprise knowledge base construction. Knowledge Inc.’s privacy policy (knowledge.com/privacy) states personal information is stripped before storage, retaining only public facts.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because the bot can send up to 10,000 requests per hour per IP, site operators should implement rate limiting at 5 requests per second per IP. The bot is legitimate but aggressive, and threshold-based blocking prevents server degradation for small to medium websites.

ⓘ 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.