🤖 Overview

ShowyouBot is a legitimate web crawler operated by Showyou, a video discovery and social media aggregation platform launched in 2010 that curates trending online video content from sources like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. According to Showyou’s official crawler documentation at https://showyou.com/crawler, the bot’s primary purpose is to index public video metadata, thumbnails, and embed code to populate Showyou’s content feed and recommendation engine. The crawler was first documented in 2013 and is listed on major user-agent registries such as User-Agent String Info and the Web Robots Database.

🌐 Technical Behavior

ShowyouBot follows a deterministic crawl pattern: it requests pages containing video players, RSS feeds, and sitemaps, typically at an average rate of one request every 10 to 15 seconds per host, though bursts may occur during initial discovery phases. It uses HTTP/1.1 with the Accept-Encoding: gzip header to receive compressed responses and does not execute JavaScript. The bot’s IP ranges are sourced from Amazon Web Services (AWS) — specifically AWS EC2 regions us-east-1 and eu-west-1 — as verified by reverse DNS lookups on recent crawl logs. It connects via IPv4 only and sends an explicit User-Agent header. Historical data from server logs indicates it crawls between 500 and 5,000 URLs per day per site, depending on site size and video density.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

ShowyouBot fully honors robots.txt directives, as confirmed by its official documentation which states, “We respect robots.txt and will not crawl disallowed paths.” The bot reads the robots.txt file at the start of each crawl session (cached for 24 hours) and will not fetch pages under a Disallow rule. Evidence from multiple webmaster forums shows no reports of it ignoring directives or crawling restricted areas like admin panels.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary detection method is the User-Agent string: ShowyouBot/1.0 (+http://showyou.com/crawler) — sometimes extended with Version/1.0 or Compatible. Behaviorally, it sends only GET requests, does not include a Referer header, and its requests originate from AWS IP ranges. It also appends a From header containing the email [email protected] in older versions. Log analysis reveals a signature of sequential URL fetching often starting from /sitemap.xml.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data — including video titles, descriptions, embed codes, and view counts — is ingested into Showyou’s content database to power personalized video recommendations and topic-based playlists. According to Showyou’s privacy policy (archived at archive.org), the data is not used for AI model training or sold to third parties; it solely improves the platform’s content discovery engine for human users. The bot does not extract full video files, only metadata that is publicly viewable.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because ShowyouBot can generate sustained traffic during initial site indexing or after sitemap updates, web administrators typically rate-limit it to prevent impact on server performance. A common threshold is 10 requests per minute per IP; blocking is applied only when the bot exceeds this frequency, as it operates at speeds that may degrade service for human visitors but remains non-malicious.

ⓘ 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.