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Our crawlers

Kenaptic operates two crawlers. They have different jobs, read different things, and you may see either in your access logs. This page is the reference for both: what they are, what they store, and how to stop them.

KenapticBot KenapticProspector
User-Agent KenapticBot/1.0 (+https://www.kenaptic.com/bot) KenapticProspector/1.0 (+https://kenaptic.com/crawler)
Why it is here A Kenaptic customer connected this site as a content source Public research, or someone ran a free estate scan on this domain
Reads Pages within sources a customer chose Public pages only, sampled
Stores Derived metadata, personal data stripped first Metadata only — no page bodies
Typical rate 1 request/second per host, slower if you ask 1 request every 2 seconds per host; up to 10/second for a 20-second estate scan
Opt out robots.txt robots.txt

Both honour robots.txt. Neither executes JavaScript, submits forms, uses credentials, or reads anything behind a login.


KenapticBot — reading a customer's connected sources

This is the crawler doing Kenaptic's actual work. A customer connects content sources they choose — their documentation, knowledge base, blog, forum — and KenapticBot fetches those pages so Kenaptic can find relationships between them. The output is a plain hyperlink from one of their pages to another.

You will see KenapticBot if a Kenaptic customer named your site as a source. That includes their own properties, and it includes third-party sites they want to link to.

What it stores

Minimal derived metadata: the URL, the title, a topic digest and an embedding. It does not republish your content and does not store page bodies.

Personal data is removed before anything is written down

KenapticBot strips personal identifiers — email addresses, phone numbers, @handles, usernames, bylines, profile links — from the title, body and description at the moment of ingestion, before storage. Everything derived afterwards is built from the cleaned text, so no personal data is stored and none is sent to a language model.

This applies to every source, including sites operated by the customer who asked us to read them. Detection is pattern matching that runs on our own infrastructure — your text is not sent to a model in order to find the personal data in it.

This is data minimisation applied everywhere, not a guarantee that pattern matching catches every possible form of personal data in free prose. If you would rather a page were not read at all, the opt-out below is immediate.

Politeness

One request per second per host by default, and your Crawl-delay wins if it is slower. Requests are spread over time rather than issued in bursts.

Beyond robots.txt

KenapticBot also treats these as instructions not to read a page, and records the refusal:

  • X-Robots-Tag response headers containing noai or notrain
  • <meta name="robots" content="… noai …"> in the page
  • A machine-readable TDM reservation at /tdmrep.json
  • Anything behind a login wall — an authentication challenge ends the fetch; it is never worked around

KenapticProspector — mapping public content estates

This crawler answers a narrower question: how connected is a site's public content? It maps which content silos a domain has — documentation, knowledge base, blog, community — and counts the editorial links that actually run between them, discounting the navigation and footer links every page carries.

It runs in two modes.

Research. We look at public content estates to understand how fragmented they typically are. One request every two seconds per host, and it samples rather than crawling exhaustively.

Estate scan. Anyone can run a free scan on a domain from our home page. That crawl is deliberately small and hard-capped:

At most 100 pages across every silo combined, per scan
At most 20 seconds the whole scan is abandoned at the deadline
At most 8 hosts subdomain probing cannot become enumeration
Up to 10 requests/second per host within that 20-second window, and your Crawl-delay still wins
One real crawl per domain per 6 hours whoever asks — everyone else is served the cached result

None of those limits can be raised by whoever ran the scan. There is no page-count parameter and no deep-scan toggle; the cost of a scan is ours to set, not the caller's.

What it stores

Metadata only — URLs, titles, which silo a page belongs to, and link counts between silos. It does not store page bodies, paragraphs or extracts.

It sees your site the way an AI crawler does

KenapticProspector does not execute JavaScript, on purpose. It reads exactly the HTML that GPTBot, ClaudeBot and other AI crawlers receive — which is the point of the exercise. If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, we will not see it, and neither will they.


How to opt out

robots.txt is the opt-out for both crawlers. It is self-service, it takes effect on our next fetch, and it needs no contact with us.

Block both:

User-agent: KenapticBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: KenapticProspector
Disallow: /

Block one and allow the other — for example, keep the free estate scan working while declining to be used as a source:

User-agent: KenapticBot
Disallow: /

Restrict rather than block — slow us down, or protect part of the site:

User-agent: KenapticBot
Crawl-delay: 10
Disallow: /internal/

What blocking KenapticBot also does

Blocking KenapticBot does more than stop future crawls. On the next daily policy pass, any existing Kenaptic-injected links pointing at your pages are automatically retracted. You do not need to ask for that separately, and you do not need to tell us.


What neither crawler will ever do

  • Crawl behind a login, or use credentials of any kind
  • Submit a form, or bypass a paywall or any other technical access control
  • Execute JavaScript
  • Republish your content — the output is a hyperlink to your page
  • Ignore robots.txt, or treat a block as advisory

Verifying a request is really from us

Both crawlers identify themselves by User-Agent, and each one links to a page explaining it. Be aware of the limit of that: a User-Agent is a claim, not proof. Anyone can send a request calling itself KenapticBot, and traffic that misbehaves while wearing our name is not ours.

We do not currently publish a list of source addresses. If you are seeing traffic attributed to either crawler that does not match the behaviour described on this page — ignoring your robots.txt, crawling far faster than the rates above, requesting pages behind authentication — please tell us. We will confirm whether it was us, and if it was, it is a bug we want to fix.


Contact

Questions, complaints or removal requests: send us a message. Removal requests are handled first, and you do not need to be a customer.

If you are reporting crawler behaviour, the useful details are the User-Agent string as your logs recorded it, the source address, a timestamp with a timezone, and a few of the paths requested.