KotaBot
If you are reading this page, our robot came by your site and you wanted to know who it was. Here is the full answer, including how to shut it out.
What it announces
Its user agent, as it lands in your logs:
KotaBot/1.0 (+https://machinaindex.com/bot ; argus mondial des machines industrielles ; contact@machinaindex.com)
It never disguises itself as a browser on the sites it reads directly, and it creates no account.
What it does
We build a price guide for used industrial machinery: machining centres, lathes, presses, grinders, compressors. Publishing a quote that holds up takes real prices, dated and sourced. Our robot therefore reads auction results and listings with a displayed price on 55 sites across 24 countries, and keeps the price, the date, the model, the year and the location. Nothing else: not your photographs, not your copy, not your customers' details.
How often
One request per second at most, often one every three seconds, and a single pass per day or per week depending on the source. It honours the Retry-After header, stops at the first sign of repeated refusal, and waits six hours before trying again. If your server slows down, it slows down. It has no interest in getting in your way: a site that is down publishes no prices.
How to shut it out
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: KotaBot Disallow: /
It re-reads it on every pass and leaves. You can also open only part of your site, or set a pace with Crawl-delay: it applies it. For anything particular — a takedown, or negotiated access that would save us reading your pages — write to us; we answer. contact@machinaindex.com
What we publish about you
Price statistics by model, never your catalogue. A quote aggregates dozens of sales from several sources; it cannot be used to reconstruct yours. Every price keeps the name of the source that published it, because a price guide without traceability is worth nothing — and because the work you do in publishing your results deserves the credit.