Spotting fake crawlers and scrapers in logs

Spotting fake crawlers and scrapers in logs

Not every 'Googlebot' is Google — some are scrapers hiding behind the name. References to catch them.

→ Google's reverse-DNS verification doc (again, because it's the test). Any 'Googlebot' that fails the lookup is a fake.
Takeaway: failed reverse DNS + Googlebot UA = block candidate.

⭐ Pick of the week: Cloudflare's writeups on bot impersonation — the behavioral tells (no robots.txt fetch, hammering one path, odd request cadence).
Takeaway: real Googlebot fetches robots.txt; fakes often skip it.

→ The 'requests-per-second per IP' awk pattern to flag aggressive scrapers.

→ Project Honeypot and AbuseIPDB — cross-reference suspicious IPs.

Credit to Cloudflare, Google, and the abuse-database maintainers.