🤖 Overview

The linkbot is a web crawler operated by Linkfluence (acquired by Meltwater in 2019) for social media monitoring and brand intelligence. Its primary purpose is to collect publicly accessible web content – including news articles, blog posts, forum discussions, and social media pages – to feed into Linkfluence’s social listening and analytics platform, enabling clients to track brand mentions, sentiment, and emerging trends across the open web. The bot has been active since at least 2015 and is documented in Linkfluence’s technical support pages and User-Agent lists maintained by webmasters.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The linkbot performs crawling by following hyperlinks from a curated seed set of domains and using sitemaps when available. It typically makes requests at a moderate rate of approximately 1–2 requests per second per IP, but can burst higher during initial deep crawls. The bot uses HTTP/1.1 and supports compression (gzip, deflate) to reduce bandwidth. Known IP ranges are drawn from Linkfluence’s cloud infrastructure, primarily in AWS regions (us-east-1, eu-west-1) and their own datacenters in France. It always fetches robots.txt before crawling any domain, and by default respects Crawl-Delay directives if specified. The crawler identifies itself via the User-Agent header and does not use random user‑agent rotation. Official documentation from Linkfluence states that the bot may also crawl HTTPS pages and respects noindex meta tags.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Based on Linkfluence’s own published crawler guidelines, linkbot fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt. Webmasters can block the bot using User-agent: linkbot followed by Disallow: /. Evidence from multiple webmaster forums and the bot’s observed behavior (consistently checking robots.txt first) confirms compliance. The bot also respects Allow overrides when present.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is linkbot (case‑sensitive), though variants such as Linkfluence Bot or Linkfluence/1.0 have been reported. The bot also sends a From header with a contact email (e.g., [email protected]) and a Referer header that sometimes reflects the seed domain. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent request pattern (fetching HTML, then CSS/JS, then images) and a distinct DNS PTR record pointing to crawl.linkfluence.net for some IPs.

📊 Data Usage

Data collected by linkbot is used exclusively for Linkfluence’s social media monitoring and brand intelligence products, now part of Meltwater. The crawled content is indexed for keyword search, entity extraction, sentiment analysis, and trend tracking. According to Meltwater’s privacy policy, the data is not sold to third parties and is processed to generate aggregated analytics dashboards for paying subscribers. No personal information beyond what is publicly available is retained.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although linkbot is a legitimate crawler, it can become aggressive when re‑crawling high‑traffic sites, causing increased server load. Rate‑limiting is therefore applied by many webmasters, typically setting a limit of 10–20 requests per minute per IP. This threshold blocking is a standard practice to ensure the bot’s activities do not degrade site performance for human users, while still allowing regular, non‑disruptive crawling.

ⓘ 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.