🤖 Overview

SplitSignalBot is a legitimate web crawler operated by SplitSignal Technologies Inc., a company specializing in real-user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic website performance testing. First documented in 2022, the bot systematically fetches pages to measure load times, resource sizes, and third-party dependency behavior for the SplitSignal performance dashboard, which is used by web developers and DevOps teams to optimize user experience. According to SplitSignal’s official documentation at splitsignal.com/docs/crawler, the bot is explicitly not an AI training crawler; its sole purpose is to collect performance metrics, not content for model training.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler operates over HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols, issuing GET requests with a configurable fixed interval of 30 seconds between successive requests to the same domain, as stated in SplitSignal’s crawler FAQ. It respects the Cache-Control header and includes a custom X-SplitSignal-Request-ID header for traceability. Its IP ranges are publicly listed in the SplitSignal support article titled “Whitelist Our Crawler” — these include 198.51.100.0/24 and 203.0.113.0/24 (example ranges from official documentation). The bot does not follow redirects more than three hops and does not execute JavaScript, focusing only on static HTML resources to avoid biasing performance measurements. It also sends a User-Agent that includes a version suffix, e.g., SplitSignalBot/2.0, with the version incremented after each major code change, as noted in SplitSignal’s changelog on GitHub at github.com/splitsignal/crawler.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the same documentation, SplitSignalBot fully honors robots.txt directives, including both Disallow and Crawl-delay parameters. The official stance, published on their website, is that operators should use robots.txt to exclude areas like login pages or admin panels that would skew performance data. Tests by third-party security researchers (e.g., a 2023 post on the Web Performance Forum) confirm that the bot never accesses disallowed paths.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is SplitSignalBot/2.0 with optional comments like +https://splitsignal.com/bot. An additional identifying header is X-SplitSignal-Request-ID, which contains a UUID. Behavioral fingerprints include a strict 30-second inter-request delay and a consistent request pattern of exactly one page per visit (no concurrent fetches). The bot also announces itself in reverse DNS lookups with hostnames under crawler.splitsignal.com.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data — page load timing, resource sizes, HTTP status codes, and the presence of third-party scripts — is aggregated into the SplitSignal Performance Score, a metric shown in their dashboard. The raw data is retained for 90 days per their privacy policy at splitsignal.com/privacy. It is not used for any AI training, advertising profiling, or content indexing; it solely feeds performance analytics for site owners who have added their site to SplitSignal’s monitoring.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Site operators are advised to rate-limit SplitSignalBot only when its fixed 30-second delay is insufficient for high-traffic sites; a threshold of 5 requests per minute per IP is recommended by SplitSignal themselves in their rate-limiting guide. This policy is rational as the bot’s behavior is entirely transparent and non‑aggressive, making blocklisting unnecessary except for extreme load conditions.

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