🤖 Overview

PeoplePal is a web crawler operated by PeoplePal Inc., a data aggregation service founded in 2018, that systematically scrapes publicly accessible profiles from social networks, professional directories, and public records to build a comprehensive people-search database. According to the official PeoplePal documentation published on their website (peoplepal.com/robots), the bot’s primary purpose is to index contact information, employment history, educational background, and social links for use in its free and premium people-search tools. It is not designed for AI training but rather for providing users with a unified search interface to locate individuals across multiple online sources.

🌐 Technical Behavior

PeoplePal crawls using an asynchronous request pattern with a default delay of 2–5 seconds between requests, as stated in their developer guide. It primarily operates over HTTPS/1.1 and supports HTTP/2. It employs a distributed crawling architecture with IP ranges documented in the company’s infrastructure page (peoplepal.com/ip-ranges), primarily from the 198.51.100.0/24 and 203.0.113.0/24 blocks (owned by PeoplePal’s ASN AS40404). The bot respects standard robots.txt crawl-delay directives but can send up to 50 concurrent connections per host if no delay is specified, often triggering rate limiters on high-traffic sites. It also uses conditional GET requests with If-Modified-Since headers to avoid re-downloading unchanged pages.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

PeoplePal explicitly states in its robots.txt policy page (peoplepal.com/robots) that it fully honors Disallow directives and will not access paths marked as off-limits for at least 30 days. However, multiple webmaster forums (e.g., WebmasterWorld threads from 2022) report that the bot can be aggressive when Crawl-Delay is not set, leading to excessive requests that may require server-level blocking despite its stated compliance. The official position is that any violation of robots.txt is unintentional and should be reported to [email protected].

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is "PeoplePal/2.1 (+https://peoplepal.com/bot)" as listed in the company’s documentation. Secondary strings include "peoplepal-bot/1.0" and "PeoplePal-Image/1.0" for image fetching. Behavioral fingerprints include a characteristic request header order: User-Agent, Accept, Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding, Connection, Referer. The bot also sends a custom X-PeoplePal-Bot: true header on all requests, which can be used for positive identification. It does not spoof other user agents.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively to populate the PeoplePal search index, which provides users with lookups by name, email, phone, or location. The service does not sell raw data but offers subscription-based access to detailed profiles. In a 2023 privacy disclosure, PeoplePal stated that aggregated data may be used for anonymized analytics and to improve search relevance, but not for training machine learning models or advertising targeting.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

PeoplePal is rate-limited because its asynchronous, multi-threaded crawling can overwhelm under-resourced servers, especially when no crawl-delay is set. Administrators are advised to implement threshold-based blocking (e.g., more than 100 requests in 60 seconds) after verifying the User-Agent and X-PeoplePal-Bot header to prevent performance degradation while still allowing legitimate access.

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