peer39_crawler

The peer39_crawler is a specialized web crawler from Peer39, a company providing contextual intelligence solutions for digital advertising. The bot's function is to scan web pages and analyze their content to build Peer39's semantic analysis database. It is a commercial web crawler focused on content categorization and analysis, rather than general search indexing. It identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string peer39_crawler.

The peer39_crawler is visiting your website to analyze and categorize its content for contextual advertising. This information helps advertisers determine if your site is a good match for their targeting criteria. The bot visits sites on a semi-regular basis to keep its content categorization database current. This is a standard and authorized industry practice for ad tech companies, as the data collection enables more relevant advertising.

The purpose of the peer39_crawler is to support Peer39's contextual intelligence platform. Unlike behavioral targeting, which relies on user data, contextual targeting focuses on the content of a webpage. The bot analyzes content to categorize it across many dimensions, including topics, sentiment, and brand safety. This allows advertisers to place their ads in relevant and brand-safe environments without using cookies. For publishers, this can be beneficial as it may increase the value of their ad inventory by making it more precisely targetable.

To prevent the peer39_crawler from analyzing your site, you can add a disallow rule for it in your robots.txt file. This is the standard method for managing crawler access.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file to block this bot:

User-agent: peer39_crawler
Disallow: /