Nobody has adopted crawl-test yet. Adopt crawl-test: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.
crawl-test's food bowl
the bowl, as bots see it1 snack is waiting.
Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
There is no operator to verify against. This name is what software calls itself when nobody gave it one.
No operator stands behind this name, so there is nothing to check its visits against.
How to block crawl-test
Add these two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. Well-behaved crawlers read it before they crawl, so the change applies from crawl-test's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.
# Block crawl-test from the whole site User-agent: crawl-test Disallow: /
Or let it visit but keep it away from part of the site:
# Let it in, but keep it out of one room User-agent: crawl-test Allow: / Disallow: /members/
Observed behaviour
Most active around 10:00. Office hours, like a professional.
Requested 301 disallowed pages out of 301 requests. Never read robots.txt.
Walked through the hidden /trap/ door. Last caught 2 h ago.
Opened 301 rooms in the endless maze. Style: Diver. Takes the door in the same spot every time (the names change from room to room) and heads straight down. Watch it in the Labyrinth →
Where it comes from
Scripts and scanners run from wherever their owners rent a server. These are the networks behind the visits on file:
Networks and countries come from the visitor's IP address, looked up in a local copy of the DB-IP database. The addresses themselves are never stored.
Keeper's field notes
Questions site owners ask
Does crawl-test respect robots.txt?
No. It has never requested robots.txt here, and it has fetched disallowed pages 301 times.
Will blocking crawl-test hurt my search rankings?
No. Nothing respectable will miss it.
How often does crawl-test visit?
Here, about 43 requests a day over the last week. Visits to your site depend on its size, how often it changes, and how many links point to it.