REVU Developers
GitHub

Privacy and data#

The privacy rules are applied on your server, before anything is queued. What leaves your server is one small event per reported request: eight fields about the request, plus the event type and a random event id.

The event#

One $crawl event per reported request:

{
  "event_type": "$crawl",
  "event_id": "7a0c3e2e-6d1b-4b8e-9f51-2f0b1d7e9c44",
  "timestamp": "2026-09-15T10:21:04.512Z",
  "host": "shop.example",
  "path": "/pricing",
  "method": "GET",
  "status": 200,
  "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ExampleBot/1.0; +https://example.com/bot)",
  "ip": "203.0.113.7",
  "referer_host": null
}

event_id is a random UUID and timestamp is the time of the request. status is null when the adapter cannot see the final status (Next.js middleware that lets the request continue).

What is reduced at the source#

  • Host is the Host header, or X-Forwarded-Host behind a trusted proxy. See Client IP and proxies.
  • Path has its query string removed unless a parameter is in queryAllowlist. Path parameters (everything from the first semicolon in the path, such as a jsessionid=... session id) and fragments are never sent.
  • Referer is reduced to its hostname. The referring URL's path and query are never sent.
  • Lengths are capped: host 255, path 1024, user agent 512 characters.
  • Client IP is taken from the socket unless you declare a trusted proxy, and is validated before it is sent. See Client IP and proxies.

To keep a query parameter that matters for your pages, such as pagination, allowlist it by name:

const revu = createRevuServer({
  serverKey: process.env.REVU_SERVER_KEY,
  queryAllowlist: ["page"],
});

What is never read or sent#

  • Request and response bodies.
  • Cookies and the Authorization header.
  • Every header other than Host, User-Agent, Referer and, when trusted, the forwarding headers.
  • Anything about ordinary browser visits. Browser traffic is filtered out before an event is built.

What REVU keeps#

REVU re-classifies every hit. Hits it does not recognize as automated are dropped, and their IP is not stored. The client IP of a crawler hit is used to verify the crawler: it is checked against the vendor's published address list, or by a reverse DNS lookup confirmed by a forward lookup. Nothing about your site, the page or your visitors is part of that check. The IP is cleared after 30 days, and the hit itself is kept. A hit from an address the vendor does not use is shown as spoofed and left out of AI visibility. An address on a CDN edge network (Cloudflare, Fastly or Akamai) cannot be the crawler's own, so such a hit is left unverifiable instead, and it still counts. The package talks only to REVU, never to any other service.

View as Markdown