ShotvikBot — the Shotvik renderer

If you found ShotvikBot in your server logs, this page explains what it is.

What ShotvikBot is

Shotvik is a screenshot and OG-image API for businesses. When a Shotvik customer asks for a screenshot or PDF of a web page, our servers open that page once in a headless Chromium browser and render it. The customer gets back the image or PDF.

ShotvikBot is not a crawler:

It doesn’t follow links or explore your site.
It doesn’t build an index.
It only loads the pages our customers request, on their behalf.

How to recognise it

Every request a render makes always sends a User-Agent that contains this token. Customers can’t remove or change it:

ShotvikBot/0.1 (+https://shotvik.com/bot)

The full User-Agent is the standard headless Chrome string followed by that token, for example:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/<version> Safari/537.36 ShotvikBot/0.1 (+https://shotvik.com/bot)

The browser version may change over time, and the ShotvikBot token is always present. Requests come from our servers at Hetzner in Germany or Finland. We don’t publish a list of IP addresses.

What it doesn’t do

No stealth. We don’t disguise the browser or pretend to be a regular visitor to get past blocks.
No captcha solving and no bot-detection bypass.
No proxies or rotating IP addresses.
No logging in to your site with borrowed credentials, and no getting around paywalls.

If your site blocks ShotvikBot, the customer gets your block page or an error. We don’t try to work around it.

robots.txt

Shotvik v1 does not read or apply robots.txt. Each render is a single page requested by a customer, similar to a link-preview fetch, rather than a crawl.

To stop ShotvikBot from loading your pages, block requests whose User-Agent contains ShotvikBot, for example in your web server, firewall or bot-management settings. You can also email us (see below).

Load on your site

Shotvik limits how many renders it sends to a single website per minute across all customers. If you see more traffic from ShotvikBot than you expect, please tell us.

Email abuse@shotvik.com and include:

the time (with time zone) and your affected URL(s);
what happened (e.g. unusual load, a page rendered that shouldn’t be);
your contact details.

For a Shotvik image link, include the full link.