ev-crawler

ev-crawler is a web crawler operated by Headline, designed for intelligence gathering. It functions as a metadata collection tool, systematically visiting websites to gather specific information for commercial intelligence services. The bot identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ev-crawler/1.0; +https://headline.com/legal/crawler). It operates from a geographically distributed network in North America and Europe and is designed to be an ethical crawler, respecting robots.txt directives and maintaining conservative request rates (1-2 per second per IP). It primarily focuses on text-based content.

ev-crawler is visiting your website to collect metadata and analyze content relationships for Headline's intelligence gathering services. It specifically targets information relevant to brand sentiment, market trends, and competitive intelligence. Unlike broad data scrapers, it appears to be selective, focusing on establishing relationships between web entities. Your site may be crawled more frequently if it contains industry-specific or brand-related content that is valuable for business intelligence purposes.

The primary purpose of ev-crawler is to serve as a data collection tool for Headline's business intelligence platform. The data it gathers provides insights into market trends, competitive positioning, and brand sentiment, which are then incorporated into Headline's intelligence products. The crawler's activity does not provide direct benefits to website owners, as it serves a commercial service rather than a public search engine. Its data collection primarily benefits Headline's clients, who use the information for market analysis and brand monitoring.

To prevent ev-crawler from accessing your website, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This file is the standard method for managing access for legitimate web crawlers.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file to block ev-crawler:

User-agent: ev-crawler
Disallow: /