canonical
GoodBotCommunity-sourcedAn automated agent operated by Canonical Ltd. used for internal service verification, infrastructure health checks, and Ubuntu-related ecosystem telemetry. Operated by Canonical Ltd..
What is canonical?
The 'canonical' bot is an official utility maintained by Canonical Ltd., the company behind the Ubuntu operating system. It is primarily utilized to perform automated checks across their vast network of web services, documentation portals, and software repositories to ensure consistent uptime and correct configuration. Unlike third-party crawlers, this agent operates within the scope of Canonical's own infrastructure management and quality assurance processes.
Identification
Why it crawls your site
This bot crawls to validate that web assets are correctly indexed and that services are responding according to expected performance benchmarks. It helps the engineering team identify broken links, misconfigured headers, or downtime within the Ubuntu ecosystem. Site administrators can verify the legitimacy of this traffic by checking that the source IP addresses originate from Canonical's known autonomous system (AS) ranges.
IP ranges
Requests from canonical originate from these published ranges. For strict verification, match the source IP against this list in addition to checking the user-agent and reverse-DNS.
Block or allow canonical
Add a Disallow rule for canonical in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.
# Block canonical from crawling your entire site User-agent: canonical Disallow: / # Allow canonical full access User-agent: canonical Allow: /
Ensure your robots.txt allows canonical. Verify requests by checking the user-agent string.
Traffic & trends
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From the community
Recent Reddit discussion mentioning this bot.
Data sources
This profile is compiled from the following sources.