🤖 Overview

Snake is a web crawler operated by Snake AI Research Inc., a company focused on training large language models for natural language understanding and code generation. First publicly documented in April 2024 on the Snake official documentation site (snake-ai.io/crawler), the bot collects publicly accessible text and structured data from the web to improve the Snake GPT-series models.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Snake crawls using a distributed infrastructure with IP ranges in the 172.16.0.0/12 and 10.0.0.0/8 private address blocks (often routed through public CDN nodes), as noted in its robots.txt guidelines at snake-ai.io/crawler/ip. The bot makes approximately 100 to 200 requests per minute per source domain, with a default crawl depth of 3 levels and a 10‑second delay between consecutive requests to the same host. It follows redirects and respects Cache‑Control headers, and supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2. The crawler favours HTML pages, PDFs, and plain text files, excluding multimedia content by default unless explicitly allowed.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to official documentation (snake-ai.io/crawler/robots), Snake fully respects Disallow directives in robots.txt files. It checks the file on each new domain visit and caches it for 24 hours. The bot also reads Crawl‑Delay directives and adjusts its rate accordingly. There are no documented incidents of non‑compliance with standard robot exclusion protocols.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Snake/1.0; +https://snake-ai.io/crawler). A secondary string SnakeBot/1.0 is used for image indexing. Behavioural fingerprints include a consistent Accept‑Language: en‑US header and a From header with the email [email protected]. The bot always sends a User‑Agent header and never uses spoofed strings.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for training Snake AI language models, including the SnakeGPT series. Text content is processed into training corpora, depersonalised, and stored in encrypted repositories. The company publishes a transparency report every quarter listing the top domains crawled, as seen on their research page at snake-ai.io/transparency.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although Snake is a legitimate research crawler, it is rate‑limited because its high request volume can degrade server performance. A threshold‑based blocking policy with a 200 requests per minute cap is recommended, ensuring fair resource allocation while still allowing the bot to complete its indexing tasks within acceptable timeframes.

ⓘ 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.