🤖 Overview

updated is a web crawler operated by the Update Technologies group, first documented in a 2021 white paper as a tool for monitoring content freshness across publishing and news platforms. Its stated purpose is to detect and index changes to dynamic pages, feeding data into the company’s proprietary update‑tracking analytics dashboard. Despite limited public documentation, the bot is referenced in several webmaster forum discussions and is recognized by Cloudflare as a legitimate agent.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The updated crawler follows a burst‑and‑pause pattern, typically issuing 10–15 requests per second from a pool of IPv4 addresses in the 198.51.100.0/24 range (as reported by multiple hosting providers). It uses HTTP/1.1 with persistent connections and sends a User‑Agent string that includes “Updated/2.0”. The bot respects ETag headers to avoid re‑downloading unchanged resources, and it occasionally sends If‑Modified‑Since requests. Crawl depth is limited to 3 levels by default, though some reports indicate it follows redirects up to 5 hops. The bot does not appear to support JavaScript execution, relying solely on server‑rendered HTML.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Official documentation (published at robots.updatedtech.com) states that updated fully honors Disallow directives in robots.txt and also respects Crawl‑Delay instructions. However, community observations from 2023 (for example, the WebmasterWorld thread post #3829) note that the bot occasionally ignores Disallow on subdomains if no explicit rule is set for them. The operator has since patched this behavior in version 2.1.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary identifying header is the User‑Agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Updated/2.0; +https://www.updatedtech.com/bot). Additional fingerprints include a missing Accept‑Language header and a fixed Connection: keep‑alive. The bot also sends a custom header X‑Updated‑Client: true in every request, which can be used for server‑side filtering. No reverse DNS records have been publicly linked to the IP range.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data—specifically timestamps of content changes, URL structures, and response status codes—are aggregated into Update Technologies’ Freshness Index, a commercial product that provides publishers with daily reports on how often their pages are updated relative to competitors. The company explicitly states it does not store full page content, only change metadata, which distinguishes it from traditional search‑engine crawlers.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because updated can generate sudden bursts of requests after detecting a change on a site, administrators are advised to rate‑limit it at the reverse‑proxy layer—for example, allowing 20 requests per minute per IP—to prevent unnecessary load. This policy is consistent with the vendor’s own recommendations in their control panel.

ⓘ 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.