Companies Using Anubis

I run the crawler behind these numbers, and Anubis is the clearest case I've seen of a raw count that measures servers rather than buyers. Our October 2026 crawl finds Anubis on 2,949 live domains, 15th of 38 in Bot Detection & CAPTCHA, after a cleaning pass that removed more than twice that many. Anubis is a reverse proxy: it sits in front of a site, makes the browser solve a proof-of-work puzzle and hands back a cookie named techaro.lol-anubis-auth. Whoever runs the server decides, so one operator can put it on thousands of domains at once.

What we removed

Of 9,655 raw domains, we resolved every one and opened samples from each cluster. The biggest group, about 4,126 domains, were lapsed domains serving Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese sports-streaming and World Cup spam; 16 of the 17 we could load set Anubis cookies while serving the spam page. About 1,659 resolved to parking and for-sale servers, mostly a German parking host behind 1,192 of them, whose parked small-business domains and gambling redirects set the cookie too. A hotel-list network added 268 and an adult-chat network 144. With the domains that no longer resolve, 6,389 domains came out.

"Anubis protects whatever sits behind the server. When a spam operator or a parking company installs it, every domain they hold shows up as an Anubis site, and that was two thirds of the raw count." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: never prospect from a raw Anubis count. The cleaned 2,949 is the list; the rest is spam and parking inventory.

Who runs it by choice

The users fit what Anubis's README says it is for: protecting "the small internet" from AI companies' crawlers. In our crawl Anubis sits on a git. hostname on 64 domains, a wiki. hostname on 21 and a library. hostname on 18. Our named list is mostly institutions: 11 repositories, 8 Dutch council information sites, 4 French archive portals, plus the Fedora Project's update system, FreeBSD's wiki and ECMWF's chart site.

A lot of it is still a host's decision. All the Dutch council sites we opened say they are "een oplossing van GO.", a single supplier, and 15 Anubis domains resolve to the same block of addresses. Thirteen French archive portals share one server, and the one we inspected runs Ligeo. Four platforms account for 674 domains (22.86%): two German shop platforms for promotional-products distributors (406), a US self-storage website provider (210) and a UK office-supplies platform (58).

Sales signal: the buyer for anything Anubis-adjacent is often the hosting supplier, not the institution. One conversation with a library-hosting or council-platform vendor covers dozens of sites.

One point on the chart

The chart shows a single October 2026 point because that's the first month on the cleaned basis. Our raw totals moved with our crawl as much as with adoption: the domain set turns over every month, and our detection widens as Anubis versions add suffixes to the cookie name. Since 16 March 2026, 3,051 domains have dropped Anubis, a figure that includes the spam and parked domains, and 140 of them still ran it on another hostname when we checked.

Sales signal: treat Anubis users as a few thousand self-hosters, and track them by host and title, not by the raw domain count.

Who the users are

The United States (342 matched companies) and Germany (321) are almost level, then the UK (231), India (146), France (60) and the Netherlands (42). Germany's place comes partly from the promotional-products platforms; Advertising Services, LinkedIn's label for those distributors, leads the industries at 8.26%. 64.54% of matched companies have 1 to 10 employees, and only 34 have more than 1,000. Higher Education (2.46%), Non-profit Organizations (2.07%) and Book and Periodical Publishing (1.99%) are small shares, but they're where the named users sit.

Sales signal: for an Anubis-adjacent product, the US, Germany and the UK are the markets, and universities and publishers are the segment worth naming in the pitch.

Switching: none to report

No pair passes our switching tests. 376 domains run Anubis and reCAPTCHA today, 203 run it with Cloudflare Turnstile and 18 with hCaptcha. These are layers, not replacements: Anubis gates the site and the CAPTCHA guards a form behind it.

"The organisations that chose Anubis for themselves are the ones that won't hand their traffic to a CDN: libraries, archives, code forges. In our crawl that's about three thousand domains, not ten thousand." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: a CAPTCHA vendor sells alongside Anubis. The competitor is a managed bot-protection service, pitched to sites tired of running their own.

The stack around it

Across the 2,949 domains, WordPress is on 30.52%, Google Analytics on 33.74% and PHP on 25.74%. Cloudflare is on only 13.9%, which fits Anubis's pitch as an option for sites that won't use Cloudflare. Matomo (4.17%) and Plausible (1.32%) show a privacy-minded minority, and Drupal (2.51%) marks the universities and councils.

Sales signal: self-hosters who chose Anubis over a CDN will want tools they can run themselves. Pitch open-source or self-hosted analytics, search and monitoring.

What it costs

Anubis is released under the MIT licence, and Techaro's site (checked October 2026) says it is free and self-hosted. Techaro lists a commercial version, BotStopper, built on Anubis with managed deployment and support, at US$50 a month, marked as coming soon. Techaro also says not to use Anubis against network-level DDoS attacks or for clients that can't run JavaScript, such as API clients and RSS readers.

Sales signal: the paid tier is new and cheap, so managed hosting of Anubis is an open niche for hosts that already run it for customers.

Key takeaways

1. 2,949 domains after removing 6,389 spam, parked, hotel-list and adult-chat domains whose servers run Anubis.

2. The users are forges, wikis, catalogues, repositories, archives and council sites.

3. Hosts decide a good share: GO. for Dutch councils, a Ligeo host for French archives, and four platforms with 674 domains.

4. The US and Germany are almost level; Advertising Services leads because of the German promo shops.

5. No switching corridor; CAPTCHAs run alongside it.

How to use this list

Start from the named organisations, then group the full list by hosting platform. For every Anubis domain with company and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io, and our AI crawler statistics show the traffic these sites are trying to keep out.