🤖 Overview

VaCoBot is a web crawler operated by Vaco, a global talent solutions and consulting firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, as documented on their official website at vaco.com/legal/crawler-policy. This bot is deployed to index job listings, company career pages, and professional profiles from publicly accessible websites, feeding data into Vaco’s recruitment analytics platform and job aggregation services used by their staffing consultants.

🌐 Technical Behavior

VaCoBot employs a standard HTTP GET request crawl pattern with a request frequency averaging one request every 2 to 5 seconds per domain to avoid overwhelming servers, as described in Vaco’s technical documentation. The crawler originates from IP addresses within Vaco’s corporate network range, specifically subnets announced under ASN 30693, and supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols. It sends headers including Accept-Language: en-US and Cache-Control: no-cache, and recursively follows hyperlinks up to a configurable depth of five levels, focusing on HTML pages, PDFs, and plain text files containing job descriptions. The bot also employs a polite crawl delay algorithm that dynamically adjusts frequency based on server response times.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

According to Vaco’s official robots.txt policy published at vaco.com/legal/bot, VaCoBot fully respects all directives including Disallow, Allow, and Crawl-Delay rules. The crawl logic reads the robots.txt file before each domain session and will not access paths explicitly blocked. There are no documented incidents of VaCoBot ignoring these directives, and it also honors noindex meta tags and X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers as a secondary compliance measure.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is VaCoBot/1.0 (compatible; +https://www.vaco.com/bot), with an alternate variant VacoBot/1.0 observed in some server logs. The bot sets a custom HTTP header X-VaCoBot: true in its requests, enabling easy identification. Its IP addresses consistently resolve to hostnames under the vaco.com domain and reverse DNS records show patterns like crawler-[id].vaco.com.

📊 Data Usage

All data collected by VaCoBot is used exclusively for Vaco’s internal recruitment analytics, candidate-job matching algorithms, and to populate their talent marketplace. The crawled content helps Vaco identify open positions across industries, understand hiring trends in real time, and improve their AI-driven matching engine. No personal identifiable information beyond what is publicly available on job listings is retained, and aggregated data is anonymized for business intelligence reports.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

VaCoBot is rate-limited because its systematic crawl process can generate high request volumes on smaller web servers, potentially degrading performance for other users. A threshold-based blocking policy—commonly set at 100 requests per minute per IP—balances Vaco’s indexing needs with the operational stability of target websites, as recommended in the official bot documentation.

ⓘ 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.