SputnikImageBot

search-engine Sputnik(Image)?Bot

Defunct Russian state search engine crawler shut down 2020

About this crawler

SputnikImageBot is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern Sputnik(Image)?Bot in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as search-engine. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block SputnikImageBot traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.

Block-rate · top 25k sites

No block-rate data for this crawler.

Technical details

Name
SputnikImageBot
Pattern
Sputnik(Image)?Bot
Tags
search-engine
Reference
http://corp.sputnik.ru/webmaster
Added
2026/05/02
rDNS suffixes
.sputnik.ru
Instances
2 known sample(s)

rDNS verification (FCrDNS)

Verify a request is genuinely SputnikImageBot with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.

Sample User-Agent strings

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SputnikBot/2.3; +http://corp.sputnik.ru/webmaster)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SputnikImageBot/2.2)

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow SputnikImageBot:

User-agent: SputnikImageBot Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Sputnik(Image)?Bot [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "Sputnik(Image)?Bot") { return 403; }
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