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Crawler

WinterlineBot

WinterlineBot is the web crawler of Winterline Ltd, a UK consultancy that helps small businesses use AI. If you’ve seen it in your website’s logs, this page explains what it does and how to stop it.

User agent: WinterlineBot/1.0 (+https://winterline.co.uk/bot)

What it’s for

We look for UK limited companies in particular sectors and areas, using the public Companies House register, that might benefit from our services. WinterlineBot then visits a company’s own website to:

  • confirm the website belongs to that company, by finding its company registration number on the site
  • find its published business contact details: an email address on the company’s own domain and its phone number
  • read a short description of what the business does

We use this to decide whether to contact the business about our services, and how.

How it behaves

  • It obeys robots.txt. It follows rules forWinterlineBot and for all crawlers (*), includingCrawl-delay. If your robots.txt can’t be read because of a server error, it reads nothing.
  • It’s slow and light. One page at a time, at least 2 seconds between requests to your site, and at most 5 pages per site, usually the home, contact, about and privacy pages.
  • It identifies itself honestly and never pretends to be a browser.
  • It respects blocks. If your site refuses it (for example with a 403 or 429 response, or a bot challenge), it stops and doesn’t try to get round it.
  • It doesn’t log in, fill in forms, run JavaScript or follow links to other websites. It does follow your own site’s redirects, for example from an old domain to a new one. It doesn’t decode email addresses you’ve hidden from bots.
  • It visits each company rarely, normally once.

What we keep, and for how long

  • Your website address and the business contact details we found.We prefer general inboxes such as info@ over named people’s addresses.
  • The page each detail came from, so we can tell you where we got it.
  • A short extract of page text, deleted after 90 days.

If we haven’t worked with your business, we delete its details 12 months after our last contact with it (or 12 months after we found it, if we never got in touch). If you ask us not to contact you, we keep only the minimum needed to make sure we never do: a one-way hash of the email address and your company number.

More detail, including your rights under UK data protection law, is in our privacy notice.

How to stop it

To block WinterlineBot from your whole site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: WinterlineBot
Disallow: /

To block it from part of your site:

User-agent: WinterlineBot
Disallow: /private/

To ask us to delete your details or never contact you, email zack.parker@winterline.dev. We’ll confirm when it’s done.

Who we are

Winterline Ltd
Registered in England and Wales, company number 17483433
Registered office: 174 Strouden Road, Bournemouth BH9 1QP
Contact: zack.parker@winterline.dev

AI strategy, systems, and support for UK businesses.