WhichTractorBot
How do I make it stop?
Email bot@whichtractor.com with your domain name. That is all we need. We stop crawling your site the same day, and if you ask, we remove the facts we took from it.
Or add this to your robots.txt — the bot reads it before it requests anything from your site:
User-agent: WhichTractorBot Disallow: /
Who is it?
The fetcher of WhichTractor, a free tractor specification site. It identifies itself on every request as:
WhichTractorBot/0.1 (+https://whichtractor.com/bot)
What does it take?
Published specifications, as facts: model names, figures and units — engine power, weights, dimensions. We never republish text, photographs, diagrams or PDF documents. Each fact we keep names the document it came from.
How hard does it hit my server?
- At most 1 request every 2 seconds to one host, or slower if your robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay.
- A daily cap on requests to each host.
When does it stop on its own?
- On any 403 (or 401 or 451) response.
- On a bot challenge or captcha page.
- Where robots.txt disallows it.
- When your robots.txt or terms of use change after we last read them — until a person has read them again.
A block is a final answer. It does not retry, and it never tries another route: no proxy, no other user agent, no other network.
What happens when you email us?
- The same day, your domain goes on our blocklist. The fetcher refuses to request it again.
- If you ask us to remove what we took, the facts sourced from your site come off the site at the next publish.
- We reply to confirm both.
How our sources are used and credited: sources and licences.