Bot signals — Search & SEO crawler
Sogou states spider hostnames are *.sogou.com and anything else is an impostor. Sogou does not spell out the forward lookup; it is applied anyway. Search crawler only, not generative AI attribution.
01 — Verification
Only from what Sogou spider publishes about itself. No third-party blocklists, no behavioural guesses.
risk.is_crawler
.sogou.com.
The hostname must then resolve forward to the same address.
02 — In the response
A lookup of a Sogou spider address sets risk.is_crawler. The flags come with geolocation and network data in the same response, for Pro API keys.
The response says which kind of bot an address belongs to, not which operator. Pair it with the user agent: a request that claims to be Sogou spider but doesn't match is unverified.
{
// … location and network fields …
"risk": {
"is_ai": false,
"is_crawler": true,
"is_scanner": false
}
}
03 — Questions
Look up the PTR record for the IP address. The hostname must end in .sogou.com, and a forward lookup of that hostname must return the same IP address. A PTR record alone can be set by anyone who controls the address, so the forward confirmation is the part that matters.
A matching address sets risk.is_crawler in the lookup response. The risk flags are returned for Pro API keys.
From the blog
Pro: 40,000,000 requests a day with is_ai, is_crawler and is_scanner in every lookup.