🤖 Overview

RankingBot2 is a legitimate web crawler operated by rankingCoach GmbH, a German SEO software company based in Hamburg, as part of its website analysis and monitoring platform. The bot systematically scans publicly accessible web pages to gather on‑page SEO metrics — such as meta tags, heading structures, internal links, and load times — which are then aggregated into actionable reports for paying subscribers of the rankingCoach service. First documented in 2016, RankingBot2 complements the company’s primary “rankingCoach” bot and is explicitly listed in official crawler documentation as a non‑malicious, rate‑limited agent.

🌐 Technical Behavior

RankingBot2 performs HTTP/1.1 GET requests with a fixed crawl delay of 10 seconds between successive page fetches, as confirmed by its published robots.txt delay directive. The bot fetches only the text/html content of each URL and does not follow redirect chains deeper than three hops. Its originating IP addresses are drawn from a well‑known range 2a02:c206:2000::/36 (IPv6) and 46.101.0.0/16 (IPv4) — both owned by Hetzner Online GmbH — and are listed in the official rankingCoach IP pool. Crawl sessions typically begin at UTC 06:00 and continue for no more than four hours per domain, with a maximum of 500 requests per crawl run to avoid server overload. The bot accepts responses with status codes 200 and 304 only; it immediately aborts on 4xx or 5xx errors without retrying.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to rankingCoach GmbH’s public crawler policy page (rankingcoach.com/crawler-policy), RankingBot2 fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt, including wildcard patterns and subdirectory exclusions. Third‑party tests from SearchEngineBots.com (2019 audit) confirmed that the bot did not access any URL blocked by a User‑agent: RankingBot2 rule, and it respects crawl‑delay directives as well.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; RankingBot2; +https://rankingcoach.com/bot). A secondary variant omits the Mozilla prefix: RankingBot2/1.0 (compatible; +https://rankingcoach.com/bot). The bot also sets a custom HTTP header X‑RankingCo‑Bot: true and includes a valid From header with the email address [email protected]. IP lookup returns the hostname pattern rank‑crawl‑*.hetzner.com. No obfuscation or fake User‑Agents are used.

📊 Data Usage

All collected data is exclusively used for internal SEO analytics within the rankingCoach dashboard. The platform provides subscribers with keyword tracking, backlink auditing, and page performance scoring — no content is sold to third parties or used to train AI models. rankingCoach’s privacy policy (GDPR‑compliant) states that raw crawl data is retained for 30 days, after which only aggregated metrics are kept.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because RankingBot2 can trigger high concurrency on shared hosting — especially when multiple subscribers scan the same domain — webmasters are advised to rate‑limit the bot using its known IP ranges or apply a per‑IP request cap (e.g., 5 requests per second via .htaccess). This ensures server resources remain available for other visitors without disrupting the bot’s legitimate SEO analysis function.

ⓘ 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.