Glossary · Crawlers and access
honeypot
A field, link or path that no human visitor would use, placed so that automated clients reveal themselves by touching it. On a form it catches bots without a challenge the visitor sees; on a site it can catch crawlers that ignore robots.txt.
What honeypot means
A field, link or path that no human visitor would use, placed so that automated clients reveal themselves by touching it. On a form it catches bots without a challenge the visitor sees; on a site it can catch crawlers that ignore robots.txt. It identifies behaviour, not intent, and a real crawler that follows every link will trip a link honeypot too.
What honeypot can and cannot support
| It can support | It cannot support |
|---|---|
| A field, link or path that no human visitor would use, placed so that automated clients reveal themselves by touching it. | On a form it catches bots without a challenge the visitor sees; on a site it can catch crawlers that ignore robots.txt. It identifies behaviour, not intent, and a real crawler that follows every link will trip a link honeypot too. |
Terms this definition uses
Related terms in Crawlers and access
Who is fetching, whether they are who they claim, and what your rules actually permit.
retrieval crawler · user-triggered fetch · verified crawler · forged crawler identity · unverifiable · robots.txt · user-agent group · AI opt-out · Content-Signal · crawl budget · cloaking · challenge page at 200 · uniform refusal · nonexistent-path control · blocked render resource · off-host redirect · homepage refused · FCrDNS · Crawler trap · Conditional request · ASN blocking · operator feed · residential proxy · Google-Extended · Google-Agent · GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot · ClaudeBot vs Claude-User · PerplexityBot vs Perplexity-User · CCBot · Bytespider · agentic traffic · crawler classification · user agent · datacenter IP · vantage point · rate limit · delivery comparison
Questions about honeypot
What is honeypot?
A field, link or path that no human visitor would use, placed so that automated clients reveal themselves by touching it. On a form it catches bots without a challenge the visitor sees; on a site it can catch crawlers that ignore robots.txt.
What does honeypot not show or guarantee?
On a form it catches bots without a challenge the visitor sees; on a site it can catch crawlers that ignore robots.txt. It identifies behaviour, not intent, and a real crawler that follows every link will trip a link honeypot too.
Which area of the glossary does honeypot belong to?
Crawlers and access: Who is fetching, whether they are who they claim, and what your rules actually permit.
See it in the full glossary · 668 terms across 19 areas.