Nobody has adopted NetAPI yet. Adopt NetAPI: your name goes on a plaque on this page for a year.
NetAPI's food bowl
the bowl, as bots see itThe bowl is empty.
Identification
Its full user-agent string, exactly as it arrives at the gate:
To check a visitor really is NetAPI, run a reverse DNS lookup on its IP address and confirm the hostname ends in .bot.netapi.com. Then run a forward lookup on that hostname and check it returns the same IP. Anything that fails is an impostor; the zoo checks every visit this way and files the failures in the Trap Room. Read NetAPI's documentation.
How it is checked: its reverse DNS must end in .bot.netapi.com and resolve back to the same address. Each address is checked when it first visits, and the result is kept for a day. Visits that could not be checked are counted here, but they are not confirmed.
How to block NetAPI
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 NetAPI's next visit. Nothing else on your site needs to change.
# Block NetAPI from the whole site User-agent: NetAPI Disallow: /
NetAPI follows robots.txt (RFC 9309).
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: NetAPI Allow: / Disallow: /members/
Observed behaviour
Most active around 21:00. After dark, like a burglar.
Requested 0 disallowed pages out of 10 requests. Read robots.txt 3 times.
Has never followed the hidden link to /trap/. Either well trained or very lucky.
Where it comes from
Requests that use NetAPI's name but fail NetAPI's network check are filed separately, as impostors. These are the visits that passed, or that could not be checked at the time:
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 NetAPI respect robots.txt?
Yes. In 10 requests observed here it has read robots.txt and never fetched a disallowed page.
Will blocking NetAPI hurt my search rankings?
No. SEO crawlers build tools for marketers. Blocking them hides your links from those tools, not from search engines.
How often does NetAPI visit?
Here, about 0 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.