Velen Public Web Crawler

Operator

Velen Crawler

Type

Crawler

Official page

hunter.io

robots.txt token

VelenPublicWebCrawler

Follows robots.txt

Yes, according to ai.robots.txt.

In Vireo

Excluded, reported under Other bots

What it does

"Our goal with this crawler is to build business datasets and machine learning models to better understand the web."

ai.robots.txt describes its function as: Scrapes data for business data sets and machine learning models.

Source: ai.robots.txt.

User agent

Requests from Velen Public Web Crawler carry a user agent like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; VelenPublicWebCrawler/1.0; +https://velen.io)

Device Detector identifies it with this pattern (a case-insensitive regular expression):

VelenPublicWebCrawler

Anyone can put any name in a user agent. Where the operator publishes IP ranges, checking the request's address against them is the way to confirm a visit is genuine.

How to block or allow Velen Public Web Crawler

Add a group for its token to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To keep it out of the whole site:

User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler
Disallow: /

To let it crawl everything, use an empty Disallow: or Allow: / instead. WordPress serves a virtual robots.txt that many SEO plugins let you edit. A real robots.txt file uploaded to the site root takes its place.

robots.txt is a request, so it only works on crawlers that honour it. A bot that ignores it has to be blocked at the server or firewall, by user agent or IP address.

How Vireo counts Velen Public Web Crawler

Vireo keeps requests from Velen Public Web Crawler out of your pageviews and visitors and counts them on its bot report under Other bots, so you can see how much it left out rather than wonder why your server logs show more traffic.

Checked by running Vireo Analytics' own bot filter over Velen Public Web Crawler's user agents.

Sources

• Velen Public Web Crawler information page (hunter.io)
• Matomo Device Detector, bots.yml (LGPL-3.0)
• ai.robots.txt (MIT)