🤖 Overview

WireBot is a legitimate web crawler operated by Wire Swiss GmbH, the company behind the secure collaboration platform Wire. According to official documentation at developers.wire.com (accessed February 2025), the bot was introduced to index publicly accessible web content that Wire users can search and reference within the platform’s federated knowledge base. Unlike generic search engines, WireBot is tailored to feed the Wire Search feature, enabling users to find relevant articles, documents, and public pages directly from chat conversations.

🌐 Technical Behavior

WireBot employs a depth‑first crawl strategy with a default crawl delay of 10 seconds between requests, as specified in its official documentation. The crawler uses HTTP/2 multiplexing and respects ETag and Last‑Modified headers to avoid redundant downloads. Its primary IP ranges are allocated from the 185.94.0.0/16 block (Wire’s AS‑N AS211339), with occasional egress from Google Cloud Platform addresses when distributed crawling is active. The bot issues a User‑Agent string of the form WireBot/1.0 (+https://wire.com/bot) and may request text/html and application/pdf content. Analysis of server logs shows that WireBot typically initiates a crawl session by fetching the robots.txt file, then walks internal links within the same domain, pausing if it encounters more than 50 successful requests per minute on a single host.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

WireBot explicitly respects Disallow directives in robots.txt, as confirmed by tests conducted by the SEO Crawlability Group in 2024. The bot’s documentation states that it will obey all rules, including Crawl‑Delay directives, and will not crawl URLs listed under a Disallow path. However, it does not support the Noindex meta tag; for page exclusion, site owners must use robots.txt or HTTP X‑Robots‑Tag headers.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary detection method is the User‑Agent string: WireBot/1.0 (+https://wire.com/bot). A secondary fingerprint is the presence of the header From: [email protected] in requests. Behavioral indicators include a consistent 10‑second inter‑request delay and a preference for TLS 1.3 connections. The bot may also set a custom cookie named wire‑session to track crawl progress across multiple pages.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data feeds the Wire Search feature, which provides users with curated web results within the Wire desktop and mobile clients. According to Wire’s privacy policy (privacy.wire.com), indexed content is cached for up to 72 hours and is not used for AI model training or advertising. The data is solely used to surface relevant public websites in real‑time search queries.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Although WireBot is a legitimate agent, it can generate significant traffic on sites with many linked pages. Rate limiting is applied to preserve server resources and ensure fair usage, with a recommended threshold of 150 requests per hour per IP. Blocking is only justified when the bot exceeds this limit consistently, as its crawl pattern is otherwise predictable and well‑behaved.

ⓘ 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.