PayPal is a bot in the webhook senders category, operated by PayPal.
The PayPal webhooks is part of Paypal's Instant Payment Notification message service, automatically notifying merchants of events related to Paypal transactions.
Webhook senders call your endpoints to deliver events from payment, messaging and SaaS platforms. Blocking them breaks integrations. Allow them on the webhook paths they need and nowhere else.
Sample user agent strings sent by PayPal:
PayPal/AUHR-214.0-51787073PayPal IPN ( https://www.paypal.com/ipn )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 PayPal 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: PayPal Disallow: /
User-agent: PayPal Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: PayPal Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: PayPal Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: PayPal group, PayPal ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.PayPal from PayPal's user agent; check PayPal'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.
Allow PayPal if it is a service you use, and keep its visits out of page views and ad requests either way.
Transfon Security for publishersPayPal is not a person. Exclude it from campaign and conversion data so reports reflect real visitors.
Transfon Security for advertisersAllow PayPal only if it works for your store, and keep it away from cart and checkout.
Transfon Security for e-commerceIf PayPal is a service you use, allow it on the endpoints it needs and block it elsewhere.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows PayPal 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
PayPal is a bot in the webhook senders category, operated by PayPal. The PayPal webhooks is part of Paypal's Instant Payment Notification message service, automatically notifying merchants of events related to Paypal transactions.
We have not confirmed whether PayPal 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: PayPal" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "PayPal" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so PayPal may not follow it, and anyone can send PayPal's user agent, so a fake PayPal ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Webhook senders call your endpoints to deliver events from payment, messaging and SaaS platforms. Blocking them breaks integrations. Allow them on the webhook paths they need and nowhere else.
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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