Bot policy
Last updated: 2026-09-01
## Our crawler
HiddenIO fetches public documents with a single well-identified crawler:
- **User-Agent:** `HiddenIOBot/1.0 (+https://hiddenio.com/bot-policy)`
- **Behavior:** standard HTTP GET requests; no JavaScript execution, no form submission, no login.
- **robots.txt:** fully honored, including per-directory disallow rules.
- **Rate:** at most a few requests per minute per host, with conservative retry backoff on errors,
and a full stop while robots.txt is unreachable.
- **Conditional requests:** we send `If-Modified-Since` / `If-None-Match` where supported to avoid
re-downloading unchanged documents.
## Opting out
Any of the following stops us from fetching your content — add these two lines to your robots.txt:
> `User-agent: HiddenIOBot` · `Disallow: /`
Blocking by User-Agent string or IP works equally well; we do not rotate identities to evade blocks.
If you block us and still find indexed records from your site, they are historical — use the
[report form](/report) and we will remove them.
## What we fetch
Only publicly accessible documents (see the [source policy](/source-policy)). We do not fetch
login-required, paywalled or secret locations, and we never probe the servers described in the
documents — no ping, no connect, no TLS handshake to listed endpoints.
## Feedback
Questions about the crawler: the [report form](/report) with type "other".