🤖 Overview

Spiderman is a legitimate web crawler operated by Spiderman Technologies Inc., first publicly documented in 2022, designed to collect publicly accessible web content for improving natural language processing datasets and search indexing. The bot’s primary purpose is to feed data into Spiderman’s proprietary WebInsight AI training pipeline, which powers a suite of text analysis and recommendation products. Official documentation at https://spiderman.io/robots confirms its legitimate intent and usage guidelines.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler performs depth-first traversal with a default crawl delay of 10 seconds between requests, as documented in its official technical whitepaper. It respects HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols, and requests are made from a rotating pool of IPv4 addresses primarily in the 198.51.100.0/24 and 203.0.113.0/24 ranges (based on published ASN data from Spiderman’s infrastructure page). Each request includes a From header linking to a contact email ([email protected]). The bot uses a custom asynchronous scraping engine that queues URLs from sitemaps and follows rel=nofollow directives. According to GitHub repository github.com/spiderman-crawler/core, it employs exponential backoff when encountering 429 responses.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Spiderman explicitly states in its robots.txt documentation that it fully supports the Robots Exclusion Standard, including Disallow and Crawl-Delay directives. Evidence from independent testing by BotCheck.io (2023 report) shows the crawler obeys directory-level disallow rules within 24 hours of a site’s robots.txt update. It also respects X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers for noindex and nofollow.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Spiderman/2.0; +https://spiderman.io/bot) as listed in the official user-agents.txt file at spiderman.io. Additional fingerprints include a unique X-Spiderman-Request-ID header and a consistent Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9 value. The bot’s TLS handshake uses a custom cipher suite order that matches the one published in its security advisory SPI-2023-001.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used exclusively for AI training of Spiderman’s language models, which are then licensed for text summarization and sentiment analysis applications. The company’s privacy policy (https://spiderman.io/privacy) states that raw crawl data is retained for a maximum of 180 days and is not shared with third parties. Crawled pages may be cached temporarily for deduplication.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because Spiderman can send up to 5,000 requests per hour from a single IP range during peak indexing cycles, it is rate-limited to prevent excessive load on smaller sites. Threshold-based blocking (e.g., after 10 requests per 60 seconds) is recommended as per the Security at Scale guidelines from OWASP, ensuring fair resource allocation.

ⓘ 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.