TheLoomaBot

How to recognise it

It identifies itself on every request, and the address in the string brings you here:

TheLoomaBot/1.0 (+https://thelooma.io/bot)

We use one name for everything we fetch. We do not pretend to be a browser and we do not use a second, quieter name for anything.

What it is for

We check whether AI assistants and search engines can reach and read a website. That means reading the robots file to see which crawlers are allowed, checking whether pages can be indexed and quoted, and looking at whether the words on a page are in the HTML or drawn later by JavaScript, because a crawler cannot run JavaScript the way your browser does.

We do this for our own customers on their own sites, and when preparing for a first conversation with a company we might work with. In the second case nobody has asked us to look, so we keep it to what any visitor could see, and we keep it small.

What it takes

It only ever reads. It does not submit forms, it does not log in, it does not add anything to a basket, it does not leave comments, and it does not follow links that would change something on your site.

• Your robots file, sitemap and a small number of public pages. Usually two. At most fifteen.
• The response headers, the certificate and the public DNS records for the domain.
• Nothing behind a login, a paywall or a form.

How often

At most one request per second to the same host, and normally far less than that. A site is usually looked at once, and at most once a month after that.

We obey your robots file. We read it before we fetch anything else and we follow the rules in it, including a crawl-delay if you set one.

How to stop it

Add this to your robots.txt and we will stop. No notice is needed and nothing else has to happen:

• User-agent: TheLoomaBot
• Disallow: /

If it is behaving badly

Write to info@thelooma.io with your domain and roughly when it happened, and we will look. If something is wrong we would rather hear it from you than be blocked quietly.

If you block us, that is an answer and we will leave it at that. We do not change the name we use, come from a different address, or work around a block in any other way.