What is VelenPublicWebCrawler?

VelenPublicWebCrawler is a specialized web crawler developed and operated by Hunter.io, designed to analyze millions of public internet pages each month. Written in Go programming language, it functions as a data collection tool focused on business intelligence and professional networking information. The crawler identifies itself in server logs with the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; VelenPublicWebCrawler/1.0; +https://velen.io), which follows standard web crawler conventions while providing clear identification of its origin.

This crawler employs a conservative approach to website traversal, typically crawling only one page at a time with a minimum 2-second interval between requests to the same domain. This methodology is specifically designed to minimize server impact while efficiently collecting publicly available business data. VelenPublicWebCrawler only accesses pages that are publicly available—it doesn't attempt to crawl content behind logins or other authentication barriers.

Why is VelenPublicWebCrawler crawling my site?

If you're seeing VelenPublicWebCrawler in your site logs, it's likely collecting publicly available business information from your website. The crawler specifically targets business-related data points such as corporate contact information, professional profiles, company structure details, product/service offerings, and industry categorization data.

The crawler visits websites to build business datasets and machine learning models that help Hunter.io better understand the web. Its crawling frequency is deliberately measured to avoid creating noticeable load on websites, typically making no more than one request every few seconds to any given domain. Your site is likely being crawled because it contains publicly accessible business information that contributes to Hunter.io's data collection objectives.

What is the purpose of VelenPublicWebCrawler?

VelenPublicWebCrawler serves Hunter.io's mission of aggregating publicly available business information to facilitate connections between organizations. The data collected undergoes processing within Hunter.io's infrastructure, where it's deduplicated, normalized, and verified to create specialized datasets for sales intelligence, recruitment analytics, and market research applications.

The crawler's work ultimately supports Hunter.io's business services, which include company search capabilities, contact discovery, email verification, and related business intelligence functions. While website owners don't directly benefit from being crawled, the crawler is designed to operate ethically by respecting standard web protocols and maintaining a light footprint on server resources.

How do I block VelenPublicWebCrawler?

VelenPublicWebCrawler fully respects the robots exclusion protocol (robots.txt) and meta instructions. If you wish to block this crawler from accessing your website, you can add the following entry to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler
Disallow: /

This directive will prevent the crawler from accessing any part of your website. If you want to allow access to certain sections while restricting others, you can use more specific directives:

User-agent: VelenPublicWebCrawler
Allow: /public-profile
Disallow: /financial-reports
Crawl-delay: 5

According to the crawler's documentation, changes to robots.txt should be recognized within a few hours. The crawler is designed to be respectful of webmaster preferences, so properly configured robots.txt directives should be effective in controlling access.

Blocking this crawler would prevent your business information from being included in Hunter.io's datasets but would have no impact on your site's visibility in search engines or other services.

VelenPublicWebCrawler