CRAWLER DISCLOSURE

About the Branva Growth Audit crawler

If you found this page from your server logs, you are in the right place. This is the full description of what our crawler does on your storefront, what it never touches, and how to stop it.

It identifies itself as:

What it fetches

At most about two dozen pages per audit, once, sequentially. Specifically:

  • the homepage
  • up to three collection pages
  • up to five product pages
  • the cart page, if it is publicly reachable
  • the shipping, returns, FAQ, about and contact pages

    • That is the whole scope. It does not spider your catalogue, it does not return on a schedule, and it does not follow every link it finds.

    How it behaves

  • robots.txt first. It is fetched before anything else and honoured for every subsequent request, including any Crawl-delay you have set.
  • One request at a time. Sequential, with a delay between requests. Never parallel.
  • Hard exclusions. /checkout, /account, /admin and order paths are excluded before robots.txt is even consulted. They are off limits whether or not you have disallowed them.
  • It never logs in, never submits a form, and never attempts to evade bot protection.
  • No customer data is collected. The audit looks at your public storefront as a shopper would see it.

    • In practice this is a smaller footprint than a single human browsing session.

    What we keep

    Page HTML is discarded once the audit is generated. We retain three things:

  • the store origin (the domain we audited)
  • the audit inputs
  • the report itself

    • Retention and deletion are covered in the privacy policy.

    How to block it

    Add this to your robots.txt:

    User-agent matching in robots.txt is case-insensitive, so the token above works regardless of how the agent string is cased in your logs. It takes effect on the next audit request, because robots.txt is fetched first every time.

    If you would rather be added to a permanent block list, email hello@withbranva.com with your domain. A person reads that address and will confirm when it is done.

    What the audit is and isn’t

    The audit is advisory. It is based on publicly available information at a single point in time, it makes no guarantee of any commercial outcome, and it does not measure your actual results. The full statement is in the terms of service.

    Questions about the crawler that this page doesn’t answer go to hello@withbranva.com.