# Website Crawling Governance: ImpactCINDAgent Explained

This article explains how to identify, verify, and control ImpactCINDAgent.

ImpactCINDAgent is a web crawler operated by impact.com and used to verify that pages on partner and brand sites correctly use impact.com tracking and comply with brand agreements.

If your site participates in an impact.com partnership program, ImpactCINDAgent periodically fetches pages to:

* **Verify tracking**: Ensure tracking links and tags are correctly installed and functioning.
* **Review compliance**: Check that page content is consistent with published brand-safety and compliance agreements.
* **Report**: Extract non-personal metadata (titles, canonical URLs, product images, SKUs) to power reporting for partners.
* **Discover**: Perform broader crawls to discover content promoting impact.com-enrolled brands on domains not yet registered in the platform.

### Identify the ImpactCINDAgent

ImpactCINDAgent identifies itself via a specific User-Agent string.

```
Full User-Agent String: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ImpactCINDAgent) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/129.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
```

{% hint style="success" %}
**Note**: The Chrome version segment is updated as the underlying browser is upgraded. To reliably identify the bot, match the substring ImpactCINDAgent.
{% endhint %}

### Verify a request

If you need to confirm that a request actually came from impact.com (and is not a spoofed User-Agent), use one of the following methods, listed from least to most authoritative:

#### Method 1: IP range check (high confidence)

Confirm the request's source IP falls within these impact.com-controlled ranges:

**CIDR ranges**:

* `163.116.128.0/17`
* `162.10.0.0/17`
* `31.186.239.0/24`
* `8.39.144.0/24`
* `8.36.116.0/24`

**Individual addresses**: `34.145.188.137`, `35.245.212.57`, `34.21.56.213`, `34.48.90.233`, `35.245.229.167`, `34.150.151.151`, `35.245.185.65`, `35.188.242.212`, `34.86.33.122`, `34.145.224.193`, `35.245.135.218`, `35.221.1.178`, `34.150.217.77`, `107.175.80.80`, `162.212.175.22`, `107.172.69.119`

#### Method 2: Signature verification (highest confidence)

Every request from ImpactCINDAgent is cryptographically signed (per [RFC 9421](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9421)). You can verify signatures against our [public key directory](https://cind-crawler.impact.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory). This implementation is run on [web-bot-auth specification](https://thibmeu.github.io/http-message-signatures-directory/draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture.html) that builds on the *RFC 9421* specification.

**Expected behavior:**

* **Headless Browsing**: ImpactCINDAgent uses a real headless browser. It issues a `GET` request, renders the page, executes JavaScript, and fetches sub-resources (CSS/JS) to see the page exactly as a user would.
* **Screenshots**: It may capture a screenshot for internal compliance review. These are never public.
* **Redirects**: It follows redirects, including across different origins.
* **No Destructive Actions**: It does not submit forms, bypass CAPTCHAs/paywalls, or perform `POST`/`DELETE` requests.

### Control access

ImpactCINDAgent respects `robots.txt` directives addressed specifically to ImpactCINDAgent or the wildcard `*`.

#### Block entirely

```
User-agent: ImpactCINDAgent
Disallow: /
```

#### Set a crawl rate

If the crawler is affecting your site performance, use the `Crawl-delay` directive.

```
User-agent: ImpactCINDAgent
Crawl-delay: 10
```

#### Rate limits and back-off

ImpactCINDAgent automatically reduces its request rate if your server returns:

* HTTP 429 (Too many requests)
* HTTP 503 (Service unavailable)
* It also respects the `Retry-After` header if provided.

{% hint style="danger" %}
**Important**: If your site participates in an impact.com program, blocking this crawler may prevent us from verifying your tracking or compliance, which could affect your program's standing. We recommend using `Crawl-delay` instead of a full block.
{% endhint %}


---

# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://help.impact.com/other/reference-documentation/website-crawling-governance-impactcindagent-explained.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.