About the zoo

Most of the visitors to most websites are not people. This one counts them, names them and puts them on display.

Every request to this site is checked against a catalogue of known crawlers. The big ones are verified by reverse DNS or by the IP ranges their operators publish, so an impostor wearing a Googlebot costume ends up in the Trap Room. Anything unrecognised is filed in the Feral Pit. Each bot is drawn as a creature generated from its own name, so the same bot always looks the same.

The specimen files are written for site owners. If something has been eating your bandwidth, its file explains what it is, who runs it, whether it obeys robots.txt, and how to keep it out.

What we count

Requests, not people. A crawler that fetches forty pages is counted forty times. Human visitors are counted only as an anonymous daily total, so we can say how badly outnumbered you are.

The Trap Room

Our robots.txt forbids one path, /trap/. Every page links to it in a way no person can see or click. Anything that turns up there read the sign, or should have, and came in anyway.

How the site pays for itself

With advertising, clearly labelled and kept apart from the exhibits. Ads are only ever shown to people: never to bots, and never in the Trap Room. Admission stays free.