What PayPal IPN does
PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is a messaging service that sends a form-encoded HTTP POST containing payment information to a listener URL on the merchant's website whenever a transaction event occurs. Events include payments, credit card authorizations, eCheck transactions, recurring payments, chargebacks, disputes, reversals, and refunds, and merchants use the messages to automate back-office work such as order fulfillment. IPN is not a real-time service; if a message is not acknowledged, PayPal resends it for up to 4 days. It belongs to PayPal's legacy NVP/SOAP APIs, which PayPal continues to support.
How to identify PayPal IPN
Temso identifies PayPal IPNtraffic by matching the request's User-Agent header against this pattern. User-agent strings can be spoofed, so treat a match as an indication, not proof.
PayPal IPNPayPal IPN FAQ
What is PayPal IPN?
PayPal IPN (Instant Payment Notification) is a service that POSTs payment information to a listener URL on a merchant's website when transaction events such as payments, chargebacks, disputes, or refunds occur. It is part of PayPal's legacy NVP/SOAP APIs, which PayPal continues to support.
Can I block PayPal IPN with robots.txt?
No. IPN is not a crawler; it only sends notification POSTs to a listener URL that a PayPal merchant account configured, so robots.txt does not apply. To stop the traffic, remove or change the listener URL in the PayPal account that points at your site, keeping in mind that PayPal resends unacknowledged messages for up to 4 days.
About Operational Bots
Monitoring, security scanning, link previews, webhooks, and feed fetchers: the utility traffic that keeps integrations and shared links working.
Most of this traffic is service-critical or user-triggered. Webhooks and previews don't follow robots.txt, and blocking them tends to break things you rely on.
