Pigeon Bot

PigeonBot is the name Pigeon's servers use when they fetch pages, feeds and public APIs from a publisher's website on the publisher's behalf. It only runs for features the publisher uses in Pigeon.

User Agent

PigeonBot (+https://pigeon.io/docs/bot)

IP Addresses

PigeonBot's requests come from these addresses:

• 147.135.76.120 — Production (United States)
• 51.161.216.214 — Production (Australia)
• 147.135.79.134 — Staging (only needed if you test with us before going live)

The current list is always published as JSON at https://pigeon.io/bot-ips.json. If an address changes, we will tell affected publishers before it does.

To recognize PigeonBot, match on the IP address. A user agent string can be copied by anyone, so a rule that trusts the user agent alone would also let other bots through.

What It Does

• Reads categories and tags from your content management system's public API (for example, the WordPress REST API), so paywall rules can target them.
• Reads page titles of pages where Pigeon runs, so reports show headlines rather than bare addresses.
• Reads your RSS or Atom feed when you use Latest Content push notifications, so readers can be shown your newest stories. A feed is checked about every 5 minutes, using conditional requests so an unchanged feed costs almost nothing, and less often if it keeps failing.

Allowing PigeonBot Through a Firewall

If your site sits behind a firewall or bot protection service such as Cloudflare, it may challenge PigeonBot with a browser check that a server cannot pass. Features that depend on it then stop working. To prevent this, add a rule that skips the challenge for the IP addresses above.

In Cloudflare, create a WAF custom rule where IP Source Address is in the list above, with the action Skip, and choose to skip the managed rules and challenges, Super Bot Fight Mode, and the Browser Integrity Check.

Questions

If you have questions about PigeonBot, or see traffic from it you don't expect, contact support@pigeon.io.