OnCrawl is a bot in the SEO crawlers category, operated by Oncrawl.
Enterprise SEO platform powered by the industry-leading SEO Crawler and Log Analyzer
SEO crawlers map links, keywords and technical issues for SEO tools and backlink databases. They help the tool's customers, often your competitors, rather than you. Rate limit or block the ones you do not use.
Sample user agent strings sent by OnCrawl:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OnCrawl Mobile/1.0; +http://www.oncrawl.com/)Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12F70 Safari/600.1.4 (compatible; OnCrawl Mobile/1.0; +http://www.oncrawl.com/)Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
We have not confirmed whether OnCrawl follows robots.txt. Add a rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: OnCrawl Disallow: /
User-agent: OnCrawl Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: OnCrawl Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: OnCrawl Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: OnCrawl group, OnCrawl ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.OnCrawl from OnCrawl's user agent; check Oncrawl's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
OnCrawl works for an SEO tool's customers, often your competitors. It adds server load without readers, so rate limit or block it unless you use the tool.
Transfon Security for publishersSEO crawlers map landing pages and links for competitor research. Keep OnCrawl's visits out of campaign data.
Transfon Security for advertisersOnCrawl can map your catalogue, prices and site structure for competitors. Block it unless you use the tool yourself.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow OnCrawl only if your team uses the tool; otherwise rate limit it on docs and marketing pages.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows OnCrawl by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
OnCrawl is a bot in the SEO crawlers category, operated by Oncrawl. Enterprise SEO platform powered by the industry-leading SEO Crawler and Log Analyzer
We have not confirmed whether OnCrawl follows robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped, and block it by user agent if it did not.
Add "User-agent: OnCrawl" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "www.oncrawl.com" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so OnCrawl may not follow it, and anyone can send OnCrawl's user agent, so a fake OnCrawl ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
SEO crawlers map links, keywords and technical issues for SEO tools and backlink databases. They help the tool's customers, often your competitors, rather than you. Rate limit or block the ones you do not use.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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