Crawl Bot Verifier

Verify any crawl bot including Google, Bing, and Baidu.The most common way of verifying a craw bot is by checking the User-Agent string on every request, but User-Agent strings can be spoofed and to circumvent this, we can do a reverse DNS lookup to verify each request and that's what this library does.

This library verifies a crawl bot by making a reverse DNS lookup and try to match the result with the domains provided. It supports Google, Bing, and Baidu out of the box.

Supports by Default

• Google
• Bing
• Baidu

You can make it support as many as you'd like

Simply provide the domains. For example, when we do reverse dns on Bing bot IP:

IP: 13.66.144.0
Domain: msnbot-13-66-139-0.search.msn.com

Take out the first subdomain, in this case msnbot-13-66-139-0.search and we'll be left with msn.com, now provide this as the domain input.

You can also provide a regex instead of a domain string. For example,

const CrawlBotVerifier = require("crawl-bot-verifier");
const crawlBotVerifier = new CrawlBotVerifier({
  domains: { bing: [/(?:).msn.com$/gi] },
});

Note that the provided domains will override the default domains. If you provide domains for bing, then that will only override the default domains for bing.

const CrawlBotVerifier = require("crawl-bot-verifier");
const crawlBotVerifier = new CrawlBotVerifier({
  domains: { bing: ["msn.com"] },
});

Usage

const CrawlBotVerifier = require("crawl-bot-verifier");
const crawlBotVerifier = new CrawlBotVerifier({
  domains: { bing: ["msn.com"] },
});

const IP = "";
const searchEngines = ["google", "bing"];

// verify method takes two arguments, the I.P address
// and the search engines to match against.
crawlBotVerifier.verify(IP, searchEngines).then((isMatch) => {
  if (isMatch) {
    // Do something
  } else {
    // Do something else
  }
});

Supporting other bots

To support other bots simply, pass the domains for the new bot.

const CrawlBotVerifier = require("crawl-bot-verifier");

const otherDomains = ["some-domain.com"];

const crawlBotVerifier = new CrawlBotVerifier({
  domains: { bing: ["msn.com"], other: otherDomains },
});

For referenece:

Google bots IPs list

https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/googlebot.json

Bing bots IPs list

https://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingbot.json

TODO

• Verify by IP ranges