🤖 Overview

koepabot is a legitimate web crawler operated by KoepA GmbH, a German data aggregation company specializing in collecting and indexing publicly available job listings from corporate career portals, recruitment platforms, and employment websites. Its primary purpose is to feed structured job data into KoepA’s proprietary job search engine and analytics products, enabling real‑time aggregation of employment opportunities across German‑speaking markets. The bot was first identified in 2019 and is documented on the company’s official website at https://koepa.de/koepabot, where its purpose and usage policies are published.

🌐 Technical Behavior

koepabot performs HTTP/1.1 GET requests with a configurable crawl delay, typically set between 5 and 30 seconds per request, to avoid overwhelming small to medium‑sized websites. It crawls only HTML pages and ignores binary files unless explicitly linked; it does not parse JavaScript‑rendered content unless the page serves static HTML. The bot originates from a dedicated IP range (e.g., 185.xxx.xxx.xxx) registered to KoepA GmbH in Germany, and requests are issued from a single user‑agent identifier without rotation. It follows canonical URLs and respects Link rel="canonical" directives to avoid duplicate indexing. According to KoepA’s own documentation, the bot scans for structured data (e.g., microformats, schema.org JobPosting markup) and plain‑text job details, storing extracted fields such as title, location, salary, and description.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

koepabot fully honors the Robots Exclusion Protocol and will cease crawling any path explicitly disallowed in robots.txt. KoepA’s official policy states that websites can block the bot by adding User‑agent: koepabot followed by Disallow: / or specific directories. The bot checks robots.txt at the start of each crawl session and refreshes its cache after 24 hours. There are no documented reports of non‑compliance from website operators.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The dominant User‑Agent string is koepabot/1.0 (e.g., Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; koepabot/1.0; +http://koepa.de/koepabot)) and does not mimic standard browsers. Additional identifying headers include From: [email protected] (optional) and Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml. Behavioral fingerprints include sequential request patterns with consistent intervals and a lack of support for cookies, JavaScript, or image loading.

📊 Data Usage

Collected job listings are aggregated, deduplicated, and normalised for inclusion in KoepA’s job search platform (koepa.de) and for sale to corporate HR analytics tools. The data is also used to train internal machine‑learning models that improve job‑matching algorithms and salary prediction features. KoepA explicitly states it does not sell raw crawl data to third parties and deletes personal information (e.g., applicant contact details) before processing.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although koepabot is a legitimate crawler with a built‑in delay, it can still generate significant request volume when crawling large career sites (e.g., thousands of pages per hour). Many hosting providers and web application firewalls apply rate limits (e.g., 10 requests per second) as a precautionary measure to protect server resources, while still allowing the bot’s slower, polite crawl to pass through after a cooldown period.

ⓘ 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.