🤖 Overview

Ripper is a legitimate web crawler operated by Ripper Technologies Inc., a data aggregation and AI analytics company. First documented in late 2022, Ripper’s primary purpose is to collect publicly available web content for training proprietary natural language processing models and for powering a knowledge graph used in the company’s search and recommendation products. The bot is not associated with any malicious activity and is listed in the official robots.txt exclusion protocol database maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

🌐 Technical Behavior

Ripper employs a distributed crawling architecture with requests originating from IP ranges belonging to ASN 398722 (Ripper Technologies) and ASN 20473 (a cloud provider). The crawler sends an average of 10 requests per second per IP during peak hours, with bursts of up to 30 requests per second for short intervals. It uses HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols, sends a User-Agent header of Ripper/2.1 and a From header containing a contact email address ([email protected]). The bot respects Cache-Control headers and fetches both HTML and structured data formats like JSON-LD and Microdata.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Ripper’s official documentation published at https://ripper.ai/crawler-policy, the bot fully honors robots.txt directives including Disallow, Crawl-Delay, and Allow. The policy states that Ripper checks the robots.txt file before every crawl session and caches it for up to 24 hours. Evidence from independent web server log analyses (published by the Web Robots Database at https://www.robotstxt.org) confirms compliance since 2023.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identification string is User-Agent: Ripper/2.1 (or Ripper/1.0 in older versions). Ripper also sends a X-Ripper-Crawl-ID header containing a unique request identifier. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent 10‑request‑per‑second rate and a preference for pages with high link density over images or binary files. The bot’s IP addresses are publicly listed in the Ripper AS‑Set file available at https://ripper.ai/ip-ranges.txt.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for training Ripper’s large language models (internal models similar to GPT) and for building a knowledge graph that powers Ripper’s AI‑driven search tool. The company states that no personal or sensitive information is intentionally harvested, and all data is anonymized before being fed into the training pipeline. Raw crawl logs are retained for up to 90 days per their privacy policy.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Ripper is rate‑limited because its crawling pattern, though legitimate, can overwhelm small servers if left unmanaged. The policy prescribes a threshold‑based blocking approach: if a single IP exceeds 100 requests per minute or the bot deviates from its declared rate, the server should respond with 429 Too Many Requests after three warnings, as recommended in the official Ripper crawler guidelines.

ⓘ 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.