Hacker News
points by DaSHacka 2 days ago | 0 comments
Depending on the service, you may not want it to be indexed anyway (IE login pages) or, if you do, most commercial crawlers have methods to allow site owners to verify that the traffic is a legitimate crawler and not an impersonator, see:

https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...

(Though restricting the Google UA to only legitimate Google IPs seemingly would break Brave's crawler, though that's their own fault: https://safe.search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler/)

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduc...

https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3...

https://kagi.com/bot

[–] xmcp123 2 days ago
It is trivial to forge a Google bot user agent and scrape through GCP.
[–] DaSHacka 2 days ago
That wouldn't work if a sysadmin implemented the rDNS lookup mentioned in TFA. The PTR specifically must end in `.googlebot.com`, not `.googleusercontent.com`.
[–] xmcp123 1 day ago
No one does that though. The latency would be significant.