🤖 Overview

rankivabot is a legitimate web crawler operated by Rankiva, a digital marketing and SEO analytics company. Its primary purpose is to scan and index web pages to provide site owners with SEO performance metrics, backlink analysis, and competitive intelligence through the Rankiva platform. The bot was first documented in early 2024 and is used exclusively for collecting publicly accessible data to power the company’s SEO audit and reporting tools.

🌐 Technical Behavior

rankivabot crawls with a default request frequency of approximately 1 request per 2 seconds, though it may ramp up to 5 requests per second on high-importance pages. It uses HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols and identifies itself via the User-Agent string “rankivabot/1.0”. IP ranges are drawn from a dynamic pool managed by Rankiva, primarily sourced from cloud providers such as AWS (e.g., 52.70.0.0/16, 18.232.0.0/15) and occasionally from DigitalOcean. The bot respects the Accept-Encoding header for compression and does not perform JavaScript rendering or execute client-side code. It makes sequential GET requests and does not follow redirect chains beyond 3 hops.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the official documentation published on Rankiva’s website, rankivabot fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt. The bot checks for the file before each crawl session and caches it for 24 hours. It also respects Crawl-delay directives. No evidence of non-compliance has been reported in security advisories or forum discussions.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rankivabot/1.0; +https://rankiva.com/bot). The bot sends a custom HTTP header X-Rankiva-Bot: true to facilitate identification. It does not spoof other User-Agents. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistently low crawl rate (max 5 req/s), a lack of referrer headers, and a tendency to request pages in alphabetical order by URL path.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data feeds into Rankiva’s proprietary SEO analytics tools, including page speed assessments, meta tag audits, backlink discovery, and keyword density analysis. The bot does not train AI models. All data is used exclusively for generating reports visible to the site owner who has registered with Rankiva, and is not shared with third parties or used for any other purpose. Data retention is limited to 30 days per Rankiva’s privacy policy.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is recommended because rankivabot, though polite, can still generate moderate load on small servers—especially if multiple Rankiva users target the same domain simultaneously. A threshold of 10 requests per second across all inbound traffic from its IP ranges is a sensible policy to balance availability with the bot’s legitimate need to gather timely SEO data.

ⓘ 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.