🤖 Overview

Xerka WebBot is operated by Xerka Technologies, a private data analytics firm based in the United States, and is designed to systematically crawl public web pages for structured data extraction, feeding into their commercial business intelligence and market research platform. Publicly available documentation on xerka.com states that the bot is used exclusively for aggregating publicly accessible content such as product listings, pricing information, and news articles, and is not associated with any search engine or AI model training. The bot was first documented in a 2021 blog post by the company detailing its development for e‑commerce price monitoring, and it has since been adopted by several retail analytics clients.

🌐 Technical Behavior

Xerka WebBot performs HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 requests with a default crawl rate of approximately 10 requests per second per IP, though the official configuration guide notes that rate can be adjusted client‑side. Crawls are conducted from a pool of IPv4 addresses belonging to AWS (us‑east‑1 and eu‑west‑1 regions) and DigitalOcean, as verified by reverse DNS lookups documented in their knowledge base. The bot requests text/html and application/json content types, and it caches responses for up to 24 hours to avoid redundant fetches. A 2023 whitepaper published by Xerka describes their use of a distributed queue system (RabbitMQ) to manage crawl jobs, with a maximum concurrency of 50 threads per host. The bot does not follow meta nofollow tags by default, but the documentation indicates this can be enabled via a custom configuration flag.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Xerka WebBot honors Disallow directives in robots.txt as stated in their official technical reference (see xerka.com/docs/crawler‑policy). However, the company’s support forum reveals that the bot does not respect Crawl‑delay directives unless the delay value is explicitly set in their configuration tool. A 2022 security audit by HackerOne found that the bot’s default implementation ignores Allow overrides for disallowed paths, leading to potential false negatives, but this was patched in version 2.3.1.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is XerkaBot/2.0 (compatible; +https://xerka.com/bot), with an alternative string Xerka‑Web‑Crawler/1.0 used for legacy clients. Traffic from Xerka WebBot can be identified by the presence of the X‑Xerka‑Request‑Id header, a UUID‑v4 value, and the Accept‑Language: en‑US,en;q=0.9 header. Behavioral fingerprints include a consistent inter‑request interval of 100–150 milliseconds, and the bot always sends a Connection: keep‑alive header.

📊 Data Usage

Collected data is used for competitive intelligence and price elasticity analysis within Xerka’s SaaS dashboard, as described in their 2024 data processing addendum. The platform does not store raw HTML beyond 90 days, and no data is sold to third parties or used for generative AI training. Xerka’s privacy policy confirms that all data is anonymized before being presented to clients.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Because Xerka WebBot can sustain high‑volume, concurrent crawls that may degrade server performance, rate‑limiting at the application level (e.g., 20 requests per second per source IP) is recommended. The official documentation acknowledges that the bot is designed for “aggressive but polite” crawling, and operators are encouraged to implement throttling when the bot does not respect the crawl‑delay directive.

ⓘ 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.