BlogWatchr

The crawler

A slow research crawler for food blogs

BlogWatchr visits recipe and food blogs about once a week to study how they are built and how they change over time. If this name turned up in your server logs or a security dashboard, this page explains what it is and gives you the controls.

Operator
Karl McGinnis, one person, United States
Visits
About one full visit per site per week
Pace
One request at a time, with a pause between each
Reads
Public pages, sitemaps, the WordPress REST API

What it is for

The crawler feeds an ongoing study of independent food blogs: which plugins and templates they use, how often posts are refreshed, what their recipe markup looks like, and how those things line up with search visibility over time. Results are compared across many sites at once.

It is not a search engine, not an AI training crawler, and nothing it collects is republished. Pages are stored privately so that this week's copy can be compared with last week's.

How to recognize it

Every request carries this User-Agent string. The address inside it points back to this page.

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BlogWatchr/1.0; +https://blogwatchr.com/bot)

It honors robots.txt, including rules written for it by name. It slows down after any 429 or 403 and gives up on a page after a few refusals.

A User-Agent can be copied by anyone, so the name alone proves nothing. The address below does.

How to verify it is really BlogWatchr

Every BlogWatchr request to a site that has allowed it comes from one fixed address, which exists only for this crawler and serves nothing else:

IP address
147.135.113.53
Reverse DNS
crawl.blogwatchr.com

To check a request in your logs, look up the address and then look the name up again. Both directions have to agree, the same way Googlebot and Bingbot are verified:

nslookup 147.135.113.53
# answers crawl.blogwatchr.com
nslookup crawl.blogwatchr.com
# answers 147.135.113.53

Anything using the BlogWatchr name from a different address is not BlogWatchr. Report it through the form below and it will be looked into.

Allow it through

Many food blogs sit behind Cloudflare with Bot Fight Mode or a managed challenge switched on, which stops BlogWatchr at the door. This rule checks both the name and the address, so nobody can borrow the name to get in.

  1. In the Cloudflare dashboard, open your site, then Security, Security Rules, Create Rule, and select Custom Rules.
  2. Name it Allow BlogWatchr. In the expression set Field to User Agent, Operator to contains, and Value to BlogWatchr.
  3. Click And, then set Field to IP Source Address, Operator to equals, and Value to 147.135.113.53.
  4. Set the action to Skip. Under WAF components to skip, check All remaining custom rules and All Super Bot Fight Mode Rules.
  5. Deploy the rule.

If you prefer to paste the expression into the editor:

(http.user_agent contains "BlogWatchr") and (ip.src eq 147.135.113.53)

If your protection comes from a WordPress plugin such as Wordfence or Sucuri, allow the address 147.135.113.53 in its allowlist instead. Not sure what you have? Ask through the form.

Keep it away

Two lines in your robots.txt and BlogWatchr skips your site from its next visit onward.

User-agent: BlogWatchr
Disallow: /

You can also ask through the form to have your site removed from the list by hand. Removal requests are confirmed with the site owner by email before they are acted on, so that nobody else can switch your site off on your behalf.

Get in touch

Questions, a removal request, or a report of something misbehaving under this name. Messages go straight to the operator.