RaconBot
How racon reads your website.
If you found "RaconBot" in your server logs, this page is for you. It says who we are, what the bot does, and how to make it stop.
Who we are
racon (racon.io) is a prospect intelligence service. Our customers upload a list of companies they would like to work with, and racon researches each company from public sources so that they can decide whom to talk to first. RaconBot visits a company's own public website as part of that research. It is not a search engine and it does not build a public index.
What it does
- It reads a handful of public pages of one company's site: the home page, the legal notice (Impressum or imprint), pages about management, careers and news, and the sitemap.
- It looks for plain facts: the company's address, who runs it, whether it is hiring, what technology it publicly mentions.
- It only requests a page when a customer has asked racon to research that company.
How politely
| It reads robots.txt | and obeys it. A rule for RaconBot (or the general *) that disallows a page means the page is not fetched. |
|---|---|
| Speed | At most about one request per second to one website, with a timeout and a size limit per page. |
| Identity | Every request carries this user agent:Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; RaconBot/1.0; +https://racon.one/bot) |
| What it avoids | Logins, forms, and LinkedIn. It does not try to get around paywalls, blocks or CAPTCHAs. |
How to stop it
Put this in the robots.txt of your website and RaconBot will stay away from the whole site:
User-agent: RaconBot Disallow: /
To keep it out of part of your site, disallow just that path. If you would rather not edit robots.txt, or something looks wrong, write to hello@racon.io with your domain and, if you can, a few lines from your server log. We will answer, and we can also remove information we hold about your company.
If it misbehaves
If RaconBot ever ignores your robots.txt or requests pages faster than described above, that is a bug and we want to know. Please tell us the time and the pages involved.