For shops and webmasters
FordealBot
The bot that reads shops' public product pages for the Fordeal price comparison. Its user agent links to this page (fordeal.ai/bot).
In short
FordealBot reads the public product pages of shops so that people and AI assistants see where a thing is cheapest. It obeys robots.txt, sends at most one request per shop every 2 s and never signs in or reads personal data. A shop can block it in robots.txt, ask for removal by e-mail, or send a product feed instead.
What FordealBot is
FordealBot is the crawler of Fordeal (fordeal.ai), a price comparison for central Europe. It reads shops' public product pages so people and AI assistants can see where a product is cheapest.
It keeps the price, availability, shipping and the product identifiers (EAN, brand, model). It never logs in, never puts anything in a cart, never submits forms and never reads personal data.
User agent
Every request carries this user agent. robots.txt groups are matched against the token FordealBot.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FordealBot/1.0; +https://fordeal.ai/bot)What it reads
| robots.txt | always first |
|---|---|
| Sitemaps | the ones the shop publishes (the Sitemap lines of robots.txt or /sitemap.xml) |
| Product pages | the public pages listed there and on them the schema.org Product data (JSON-LD) – name, price, currency, availability, EAN, brand |
| Product picture | the main picture, for a small thumbnail |
| Product feed | Heureka, Zboží or Google Merchant when the shop gives us its address |
Pace
At most one request to a shop every 2 seconds, one page after another, never in parallel to the same shop. A longer Crawl-delay in robots.txt is respected. Each run reads a limited slice of a shop (a few hundred product pages at most), the next run continues where the last one stopped, and a page is not read again for six hours.
Price collection runs twice a day and each run reads only part of a shop, so a page is fetched at most twice a day and most pages less often.
robots.txt rules it obeys
| User-agent | a group naming FordealBot applies, otherwise the * group |
|---|---|
| Disallow and Allow | including * and $ patterns; the longest matching rule wins |
| Crawl-delay | a longer pause between requests is respected |
| Sitemap | the sitemap lines are read as the list of pages |
| Server error 5xx | when robots.txt answers with an error, nothing is read that day |
How to block it
Add a group for FordealBot to your robots.txt. The bot reads it at the start of every run, so the change applies from the next run.
The bot also stops on its own when a shop answers 403 or 429 or shows a captcha, and does not come back for 30 days.
Block the whole site:
User-agent: FordealBot
Disallow: /Block some paths only and slow it down:
User-agent: FordealBot
Disallow: /kosik
Disallow: /vyhledavani
Crawl-delay: 10Removal of a shop or its data
Write to hello@fordeal.ai with your domain. We remove the shop's offers from the comparison and stop the bot for that domain within two working days. No form or account needed.
Send a feed instead
A product feed is better for both sides: fewer requests to your server and exact prices. Register your shop with its Heureka, Zboží or Google Merchant feed (Shoptet, Upgates and WooCommerce export these); the import runs within 24 hours and costs nothing.