# Fake Googlebot Checker - Verify Google, Bing & AI Crawler IPs (`that_red_bird/verify-bot-ips`) Actor Is that "Googlebot" in your logs real? Paste IP + user-agent rows or raw log lines and get a genuine/spoofed verdict per hit for Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and more, using official IP lists plus forward-confirmed reverse DNS. Includes spoofed-share summary. - **URL**: https://apify.com/that_red_bird/verify-bot-ips.md - **Developed by:** [mohamed alaya](https://apify.com/that_red_bird) (community) - **Categories:** SEO tools, Developer tools, Automation - **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 0 bookmarks - **User rating**: No ratings yet ## Pricing $0.50 / 1,000 ip verifieds This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events. Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/actors-in-store.md#pay-per-event ## What's an Apify Actor? An Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform. It has two run modes. In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours, and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store. In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server. Apify vocabulary and the platform model are defined once, in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md. ## How to integrate an Actor? If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects. You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready. Do not guess an integration path. Every one of them is in the agent quickstart at https://apify.com/agents.md: the Apify MCP server, Agent Skills with the Apify CLI, the JavaScript and Python clients, the REST API, and the account-free path for an agent with no human to sign in. It also carries the rule on stating cost before the first paid run. For examples already wired to this Actor's own input schema, see the [API](#api) section below. Each client library has reference documentation the quickstart does not restate: [JavaScript/TypeScript](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs.md) (`npm install apify-client`) and [Python](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs.md) (`pip install apify-client`). # README ## Fake Googlebot Checker - Verify Google, Bing & AI Crawler IPs Paste IP and user-agent rows, or raw access-log lines, and find out which "Googlebot", "Bingbot" or "GPTBot" hits are real and which are spoofed. Each claim is checked against the vendor's official published IP ranges and, where the vendor documents it, forward-confirmed reverse DNS. Built for SEO log analysts, publishers that block AI crawlers, and security teams. You also get a summary row with the share of bot-claiming hits that were spoofed. ### Input examples ```json { "rows": [ { "ip": "66.249.66.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" } ] } ``` ```json { "logLines": "66.249.66.1 - - [04/Oct/2026:10:00:01 +0000] \"GET /a HTTP/1.1\" 200 512 \"-\" \"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1)\"\n45.33.32.156 - - [04/Oct/2026:10:00:03 +0000] \"GET /c HTTP/1.1\" 200 512 \"-\" \"Googlebot/2.1\"" } ``` ```json { "logFileUrl": "https://example.com/logs/access.log", "onlyClaimedBots": true, "maxUniqueRows": 5000 } ``` ### Input guide | Field | What it does | |---|---| | `rows` | `{ip, userAgent}` objects, or raw log lines as strings. | | `logLines` | Pasted Apache/Nginx combined-format lines, or JSON lines with `ip` and `user_agent`. | | `logFileUrl` | URL of a plain-text log (up to about 60 MB). | | `aggregateByIp` | One verdict row per unique IP + claimed bot, with a hit count (default on, recommended for logs). | | `onlyClaimedBots` | Skip hits whose user-agent is a normal browser. | | `maxUniqueRows` | Safety cap on unique pairs checked (default 2000). | ### Output | Field | Meaning | |---|---| | `type` | `verdict`, `summary` or `error` | | `ip`, `userAgent`, `claimedBot`, `hits` | The input pair, which bot it claims to be, and how many log hits it represents | | `verdict` | `genuine`, `spoofed`, `unverifiable`, `not-a-known-bot`, `unverified` (lookup failed) or `invalid-ip` | | `method` | `official-ip-list`, `fcrdns`, `ip-list+fcrdns`, `reverse-dns` | | `ptr`, `reason` | Reverse DNS name and a plain-language explanation | | `spoofedShare` (summary row) | Percent of verifiable bot-claiming hits that were spoofed, plus `byBot` counts | Sample row: ```json {"type":"verdict","ip":"203.0.113.50","claimedBot":"Googlebot","hits":1,"verdict":"spoofed","method":"ip-list+fcrdns","reason":"not in the official IP list; no reverse DNS (PTR) record (ENOTFOUND)"} ``` ### Which bots are verified - By official IP list: Googlebot (and Google special crawlers and user-triggered fetchers), Bingbot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Applebot, DuckDuckBot, CCBot. - By reverse DNS: Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, YandexBot (forward-confirmed); Baiduspider (reverse only, Baidu publishes no forward records). - Reported as `unverifiable`: ClaudeBot and other Anthropic agents (Anthropic publishes no IP ranges), Meta crawlers, Bytespider, Amazonbot. The Actor says so instead of guessing. ### Use it with - Export a day of server logs, run this Actor, then block or rate-limit the IPs with `verdict: spoofed`. - Pair with `ai-search-readiness-audit`: that one checks your robots rules, this one checks who is really crawling. ### FAQ **Is a `spoofed` verdict certain?** It means the IP is not in the vendor's current official list and (where applicable) fails reverse DNS. Lists are fetched live on every run, so a very new range can briefly be missed. **Why do some IPv6 hits pass?** Official lists include IPv6 ranges and they are matched too. ### Limits (honest) - Verdicts depend on the vendors' published lists being reachable; if a list cannot be fetched the row says `unverified`, is not charged and is never marked genuine. - Only the user-agent string decides which bot a hit claims to be. - DNS checks use the platform resolver; a timeout shows as `unverified`. ### Price Pay per event: `ip-verified` $0.0005 per unique IP + bot pair with a verdict. Example: a log with 2,000 unique crawler IPs costs $1.00. Aggregation means a million hits from 2,000 IPs is still 2,000 events. Rows that could not be checked and the summary row are free. # Actor input Schema ## `rows` (type: `array`): A list of {"ip": "...", "userAgent": "..."} objects, or raw access-log lines as strings. The sample shows a real Googlebot IP, a spoofed one, a Bing hit, a spoofed GPTBot, a ClaudeBot (not verifiable) and a normal browser. ## `logLines` (type: `string`): Optional. Paste raw access-log lines (Apache/Nginx combined format, or JSON lines with ip and user_agent fields), one per line. The client IP is the first token and the user-agent the last quoted string. ## `logFileUrl` (type: `string`): Optional. URL of a plain-text access log (up to about 60 MB) to download and analyse in addition to the rows above. ## `aggregateByIp` (type: `boolean`): Group identical IP + claimed-bot pairs into one verdict row with a hit count. Strongly recommended for logs; it also keeps the cost low because each pair is checked once. ## `onlyClaimedBots` (type: `boolean`): Ignore rows whose user-agent is a normal browser. Useful for big logs where you only care about crawler impersonation. ## `maxUniqueRows` (type: `integer`): Safety cap on unique IP + bot pairs checked per run. ## Actor input object example ```json { "rows": [ { "ip": "66.249.66.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" }, { "ip": "203.0.113.50", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" }, { "ip": "157.55.39.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" }, { "ip": "198.51.100.7", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot)" }, { "ip": "192.0.2.44", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" }, { "ip": "198.51.100.99", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) Chrome/126.0 Safari/537.36" } ], "logLines": "", "logFileUrl": "", "aggregateByIp": true, "onlyClaimedBots": false, "maxUniqueRows": 2000 } ``` # Actor output Schema ## `results` (type: `string`): No description ## `downloadCsv` (type: `string`): No description ## `summary` (type: `string`): No description ## `count` (type: `string`): No description # API You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup. ## JavaScript example ```javascript import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client'; // Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token // Replace the '' with your token const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '', }); // Prepare Actor input const input = { "rows": [ { "ip": "66.249.66.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" }, { "ip": "203.0.113.50", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" }, { "ip": "157.55.39.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" }, { "ip": "198.51.100.7", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot)" }, { "ip": "192.0.2.44", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" }, { "ip": "198.51.100.99", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) Chrome/126.0 Safari/537.36" } ], "logLines": "", "logFileUrl": "", "aggregateByIp": true, "onlyClaimedBots": false, "maxUniqueRows": 2000 }; // Run the Actor and wait for it to finish const run = await client.actor("that_red_bird/verify-bot-ips").call(input); // Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any) console.log('Results from dataset'); console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`); const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems(); items.forEach((item) => { console.dir(item); }); // 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs ``` ## Python example ```python from apify_client import ApifyClient # Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token # Replace '' with your token. client = ApifyClient("") # Prepare the Actor input run_input = { "rows": [ { "ip": "66.249.66.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)", }, { "ip": "203.0.113.50", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)", }, { "ip": "157.55.39.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)", }, { "ip": "198.51.100.7", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot)", }, { "ip": "192.0.2.44", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)", }, { "ip": "198.51.100.99", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) Chrome/126.0 Safari/537.36", }, ], "logLines": "", "logFileUrl": "", "aggregateByIp": True, "onlyClaimedBots": False, "maxUniqueRows": 2000, } # Run the Actor and wait for it to finish run = client.actor("that_red_bird/verify-bot-ips").call(run_input=run_input) # Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any) print(f"💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/{run.default_dataset_id}") for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items(): print(item) # 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start ``` ## CLI example ```bash echo '{ "rows": [ { "ip": "66.249.66.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" }, { "ip": "203.0.113.50", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" }, { "ip": "157.55.39.1", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)" }, { "ip": "198.51.100.7", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot)" }, { "ip": "192.0.2.44", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" }, { "ip": "198.51.100.99", "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) Chrome/126.0 Safari/537.36" } ], "logLines": "", "logFileUrl": "", "aggregateByIp": true, "onlyClaimedBots": false, "maxUniqueRows": 2000 }' | apify call that_red_bird/verify-bot-ips --silent --output-dataset ``` ## MCP server setup ```json { "mcpServers": { "apify": { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,that_red_bird/verify-bot-ips" } } } ``` The hosted server signs you in with OAuth on first connect, so no API token belongs in this config. Clients without OAuth support can send an `Authorization: Bearer ` header instead, using a token from API & Integrations in Apify Console (https://console.apify.com/settings/integrations). ## OpenAPI specification Download the OpenAPI definition: https://api.apify.com/v2/actors/DVuGIDOGhaEGYBtSE/builds/jkyYTt0fQgk6l7pJS/openapi.json