CrawlerID

Crawlerid is a term used in distributed web crawling and data collection to refer to an identifier that uniquely tags a crawling client or process. In practice, the crawlerid helps differentiate traffic from multiple crawlers, track performance, apply rate limiting, and aid in debugging. It may be generated by the crawler controller or embedded by the crawler itself. Common implementations place the identifier in HTTP headers (for example as X-Crawler-ID), as a query parameter, or within the user agent string. Some systems log the crawlerid in access logs or in a central scheduler to assign work segments. Because crawlerids can reveal architectural details, they should be handled with care in logs and analytics, with appropriate access controls and data minimization practices. Related topics include user-agent, robots.txt, crawl-delay, and log analysis.