GS1RoDLBot

The link-verification robot operated by Asociația GS1 Romania.

What it does

GS1 Digital Link identifiers resolve to target URLs supplied by our members — product pages, instruction manuals, safety sheets. GS1RoDLBot fetches those targets periodically, only to check that they are still reachable, so members can be told when one of their links has broken.

It does not index content, it does not copy pages, it does not follow links beyond the exact target URL it was given, and it does not submit forms or execute site actions.

How to recognise it

User-Agent	`Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; GS1RoDLBot/1.0; +https://bot.gs1-systems.ro/)`
robots.txt token	`GS1RoDLBot`
Source IP	`217.156.15.76` — the complete, machine-readable list is /ips.json
Reverse DNS	`dlbot-1.gs1-systems.ro`, with a matching forward record (forward-confirmed reverse DNS)
Request signatures	HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421), Ed25519, `Signature-Agent` pointing at our key directory

Verify the source IP rather than trusting the User-Agent alone:

dig +short -x 217.156.15.76      # -> dlbot-1.gs1-systems.ro.
dig +short dlbot-1.gs1-systems.ro # -> 217.156.15.76

How it behaves

Reads and obeys robots.txt, including Crawl-delay.
At most one connection at a time per host, and at least 5 seconds between requests to the same host.
HEAD first, GET only when a HEAD is refused or inconclusive; response bodies are read only far enough to confirm the page loads.
Backs off on 429 and 5xx, and honours Retry-After.
Each target URL is checked on a slow schedule, not continuously.

How to block it

Add this to your robots.txt and the bot stops fetching from your site:

User-agent: GS1RoDLBot
Disallow: /

A block is respected, but the affected Digital Link targets on your site will then be reported to their owner as unverifiable rather than confirmed working.

How to allow it

If a firewall or bot filter is challenging our requests, you can allowlist any of: the User-Agent token GS1RoDLBot, the source IP in /ips.json, the reverse-DNS name dlbot-1.gs1-systems.ro, or the request signature verified against our key directory.

Contact

Questions, complaints or a request to stop crawling a specific site: abuse@gs1.ro. We answer in English and Romanian.