🤖 Overview

Nettrack is a legitimate web crawler operated by Nettrack GmbH, a German company specializing in web monitoring and digital asset tracking. Its primary purpose is to collect publicly available web data for brand protection, domain monitoring, and cybersecurity intelligence services offered to enterprise customers. The bot feeds data into Nettrack’s proprietary platform, which aggregates changes in website content, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses to detect unauthorized use of trademarks, phishing campaigns, or domain squatting. According to the official Nettrack website (nettrack.de), the crawler has been active since 2018 and is widely recognized among domain registrars and security vendors for its non‑malicious, compliance‑focused operations.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Nettrack employs a distributed crawl architecture with requests originating from a fixed set of IP ranges published in the company’s robots.txt policy page at nettrack.de/crawler. The bot typically issues between 5 and 50 requests per second per IP, with a maximum of 100 concurrent connections. It supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols and respects standard crawl delays defined in the Crawl‑Delay directive. The crawler operates 24/7 but pauses during local night hours (02:00–06:00 CET) for most regions. Nettrack’s official documentation (nettrack.de/crawler-policy) confirms that the bot randomly rotates user agents and includes a From header with a contact email () to facilitate site owner communication.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Nettrack fully honors robots.txt Disallow directives and is listed in the Robots Exclusion Standard registry. The company’s policy explicitly states that any URL blocked via Disallow or Allow rules will not be accessed. Independent tests by site operators (reported on GitHub issue threads in the “robots-txt” repository) confirm that Nettrack respects custom crawl delay values and does not bypass robots.txt restrictions even when encountering a 403 or 401 status code.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary user‑agent string for Nettrack is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Nettrack/2.0; +https://nettrack.de/crawler). Additional variants may include Nettrack/1.0 and Nettrack/3.0 depending on the service version. The bot is identifiable by the presence of a From HTTP header set to [email protected] and a User‑Agent header that always contains the subdomain nettrack.de. No other known UA strings have been documented.

📊 Data Usage

Data collected by Nettrack is used exclusively for the company’s own brand monitoring and cybersecurity intelligence products. It scans websites for changes in content, new subdomains, and SSL certificate renewals to alert clients about potential impersonation or infringement. The company does not sell raw crawl data to third parties or use it for AI training. According to Nettrack’s privacy policy (nettrack.de/privacy), all collected data is retained for a maximum of 90 days and then anonymised.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

While Nettrack is legitimate and respects standard limits, it is rate‑limited because its high request frequency (up to 50 req/s per IP) can strain small or shared‑hosting web servers. Threshold‑based blocking is implemented to prevent accidental denial‑of‑service conditions, with a typical limit of 100 requests per 10 seconds before a temporary ban is enforced.

ⓘ 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.