BloomtackBot

1. What BloomtackBot is

BloomtackBot is the web crawler for Bloomtack, a product operated by Outdated Digital LLC. Bloomtack turns blog posts into Pinterest pin designs for the blogger who owns them. BloomtackBot reads those blog posts so Bloomtack can design the pins and write their titles and descriptions.

2. Which sites it visits

BloomtackBot only fetches pages from blogs whose owners, or people they authorized such as their assistant or agency, connected them to a Bloomtack account. It does not crawl the web broadly, discover new sites, or follow links to other websites.

What it fetches is used only to provide Bloomtack to the owner of that blog. We don't build a search index from it, sell it or share it, and we don't use it to train AI models.

When the owner disconnects their blog or deletes their Bloomtack account, BloomtackBot stops visiting the site.

3. What it fetches

• robots.txt, before anything else on the site.
• RSS or Atom feeds and XML sitemaps that the owner connected, checked about once an hour for new posts.
• Blog post pages, to read the title, headings, excerpt, featured image and SEO focus keyword.
• The homepage, its stylesheets and the site logo, when the owner sets up their brand kit, to pick up the blog's colors, fonts and logo.

BloomtackBot reads public pages over HTTP and HTTPS only. It doesn't run JavaScript, log in, fill in forms, or try to reach private or paywalled pages. It follows at most five redirects per request.

4. robots.txt and Crawl-delay

• BloomtackBot reads /robots.txt before fetching anything from a site, and follows its Allow and Disallow rules for every URL it requests, including feeds, sitemaps, stylesheets and images.
• It follows the rules in a User-agent: BloomtackBot group if your robots.txt has one. Otherwise it follows the User-agent: * group.
• It makes at most one request per second to a site. If your robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay, it waits that many seconds between requests, up to 10 seconds. A longer Crawl-delay is treated as 10 seconds.
• It re-reads robots.txt at least once an hour, so changes take effect within an hour.
• If a site has no robots.txt, or it can't be read, BloomtackBot treats the site as allowed, as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309) specifies.

5. User agent

Every request from BloomtackBot sends this user agent:

BloomtackBot/1.0 (+https://bloomtack.com/bot; hello@bloomtack.com)

The product token for robots.txt is BloomtackBot. The version number may change in the future, so match on BloomtackBot in log filters and firewall rules, not on the full string.

Anyone can send a fake user agent. If you see requests claiming to be BloomtackBot on a site that was never connected to Bloomtack, please tell us.

6. How to block or slow it down

Add rules to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To block BloomtackBot from your whole site:

User-agent: BloomtackBot
Disallow: /

To block only part of your site:

User-agent: BloomtackBot
Disallow: /members/

To slow it down to one request every 5 seconds:

User-agent: BloomtackBot
Crawl-delay: 5

If you use Bloomtack yourself, blocking BloomtackBot stops Bloomtack from importing posts from your feed, sitemap or post URLs.

You can also email us to stop all crawling of a site. We'll confirm once it's done.

7. Contact

Questions, problems, or requests that don't look right? Email hello@bloomtack.com. If you can, include your domain, the times of the requests and the IP addresses they came from.