🤖 Overview

Twice is a legitimate web crawler operated by Twice, Inc., a company specializing in e‑commerce data aggregation and price comparison services. The bot is designed to systematically scan product pages, inventory listings, and pricing information from publicly accessible websites to feed into the Twice marketplace platform, which helps consumers find the best deals.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The Twice crawler uses standard HTTP/1.1 GET requests with a moderate crawl frequency of approximately 10–15 requests per second per host, dynamically adjusting based on server response times using an adaptive throttling algorithm. It respects Cache-Control headers and ETags to minimize redundant downloads. The bot originates from IP ranges assigned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the us‑east‑1 and eu‑west‑1 regions, with occasional addresses from Google Cloud Platform. The crawler supports both gzip and deflate content encoding and sends a Accept‑Language: en‑US header. It does not perform JavaScript rendering and only fetches static HTML and XML sitemaps.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to the official documentation (available at https://twice.com/bot), Twice strictly honors Disallow directives in robots.txt and will not crawl paths explicitly forbidden. The bot also respects Crawl‑Delay directives when present, and delays its requests accordingly. Documentation shows that the operator regularly reviews robots.txt changes to ensure compliance.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Twice/1.0; +https://twice.com/bot). Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent request pattern of fetching /robots.txt before any session, followed by sitemap URLs, and a fixed inter‑request delay of 1–2 seconds on initial visits. The bot also sends a From header with the email [email protected].

📊 Data Usage

Collected data—such as product names, prices, availability, and shipping details—is aggregated into the Twice comparison engine. This information is used to present real‑time price comparisons to end users and to train internal machine‑learning models that predict price trends. Twice does not sell raw data to third parties; it only uses the data to improve its own platform.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

The Twice crawler is rate‑limited on high‑traffic sites to prevent resource contention—webmasters typically set a crawl delay of 5–10 seconds in robots.txt or apply IP‑based throttling via WAF rules. The policy rationale is that while Twice is a legitimate agent, its sustained crawl rate can impact server performance on smaller sites, so threshold‑based blocking is recommended as a safety measure.

ⓘ 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.