Daum: Robots.txt & Crawl Policy Reference

AI Summary: Daum is the official web crawler for Daum, a major South Korean web portal and search engine operated by Kakao. It crawls the web to build the Daum search index. It respects standard robots.txt directives. Because it is a major regional search engine, blocking Daum will prevent your site from appearing in Daum search results.

Role and policy boundary

Daum is the primary crawler for the Daum search engine. It discovers and indexes web pages, images, and videos to provide search results to users, primarily in South Korea. The crawler identifies itself using variations of the User-Agent string, most commonly containing Daum (e.g., Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Daum/4.1; +http://cs.daum.net/faq/15/4118.html?faqId=28966)).

As a major search engine crawler, its primary purpose is public indexing. Blocking Daum means your content will not be discoverable by users searching on the Daum portal. Do not infer that its primary purpose is AI training, though like all major search engines, indexed data may inform their broader ecosystem.

If your logs confirm an exact Daum token and you want to prevent your site from appearing in Daum search results, publish:

User-agent: Daum
Disallow: /

For selective access (e.g., hiding private sections from search):

User-agent: Daum
Allow: /
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /internal/
Disallow: /api/

Robots.txt is advisory and cannot protect private or licensed content. Use authentication, authorization, signed URLs, and origin controls for those boundaries.

Layered verification

Start with raw access logs and preserve the complete User-Agent, source IP, ASN, reverse DNS, method, path, status, response size, redirects, timestamp, and request rate. Because Daum is a known search engine crawler, it may be spoofed by malicious scrapers.

Verify the traffic by checking if the source IP belongs to Kakao Corporation's autonomous system (AS) networks, or perform a reverse DNS lookup to see if the hostname resolves to a known Daum or Kakao infrastructure domain.

Analyze behavior without assigning purpose prematurely. Requests for public pages, feeds, sitemaps, and metadata resemble authorized search indexing; deep traversal of private areas, high concurrency ignoring crawl delays, repeated retries, or private API access may indicate spoofing. These patterns demonstrate operational impact but cannot prove the operator or downstream use.

Evaluate /robots.txt independently. Confirm the canonical host, response status, content type, exact user-agent group, and path match. A page-level directive may express a discoverability preference:

<meta name="Daum" content="noindex, nofollow">

X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow

These signals do not establish an opt-out for an undocumented client and do not secure private routes. Use authenticated delivery, signed URLs, and application authorization.

WAF and Nginx remediation examples

Once logs confirm an exact unwanted token (e.g., a spoofed bot failing verification, or if you intentionally want to block Daum globally), a narrow WAF rule can block the declared identity. Replace the example expression if your observed header differs:

{
  "description": "Block observed Daum token",
  "expression": "lower(http.user_agent) contains \"daum\"",
  "action": "block"
}

For Nginx, scope enforcement to private and high-cost routes while investigating public access:

map $http_user_agent $block_daum {
    default 0;
    ~*Daum 1;
}

server {
    location ~ ^/(private|internal|account|uploads|paywall|api)/ {
        if ($block_daum) { return 403; }
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

A User-Agent rule is easy to spoof or evade and may block a legitimate client using the substring. Do not create an IP allowlist or broad network block without current operator evidence. Test browsers, social previews, feed readers, search crawlers, approved monitors, and customer integrations. Pair edge matching with authentication, rate limits, signed assets, and anomaly detection.

Review checklist

Search logs for every exact header that may be associated with Daum and preserve representative requests. Record paths, response sizes, statuses, source networks, timing, and rate. Verify the traffic by checking if the IP originates from Kakao/Daum infrastructure.

Decide whether your objective is to preserve search visibility in South Korea, prevent extraction, protect private content, or reduce crawl load. Publish a targeted robots group only for the exact observed token, enforce sensitive routes with WAF and application controls, and test docs, media, feeds, sitemaps, uploads, and APIs separately.

References

1. Daum Customer Center (Web Document Search) — official documentation portal for Daum search, accessed 2026-08-24.
2. Google Robots.txt Introduction — general explanation of crawler directives and their limitations.
3. RFC 9309 — Robots Exclusion Protocol standard; it does not authenticate a User-Agent.

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