TruOffers

TruOffersBot

TruOffersBot reads the public offers page of a takeaway’s own website, so customers searching TruOffers see that takeaway’s current deals. It only visits websites our team has added and checked. Nothing it finds is published until a person at TruOffers or the takeaway itself has reviewed it.

Every request it makes carries this User-Agent, which never changes:

TruOffersBot/1.0 (+https://truoffers.co.uk/bot)

What it reads, and what it doesn’t

  • The home page, offers, menu, contact and branch pages of an approved takeaway website: by default no more than 50 pages a visit.
  • By default one request every two seconds to a website at most. If your robots.txt sets a longer crawl delay, it waits that long instead.
  • It never logs in, fills in forms, adds items to a basket, or tries to get past a CAPTCHA or rate limit.
  • It never visits marketplaces such as Just Eat, Uber Eats or Deliveroo, or search engines, maps and social networks.
  • It doesn’t keep copies of your pages: only the offer details and a short quote (500 characters at most) showing where each detail came from.

Controlling it with robots.txt

TruOffersBot follows robots.txt. To keep it off your whole website:

User-agent: TruOffersBot
Disallow: /

To keep it out of part of your website only:

User-agent: TruOffersBot
Disallow: /members/

The one exception: if a takeaway’s owner has told us they want their offers listed, but their website’s robots.txt asks all bots to stay away (a website platform’s setting, for example), we record that consent and read that website anyway. The same goes for websites hosted by an ordering platform that has agreed in writing that we may read its clients’ websites. It applies to those websites only, at the same slow rate, and it ends as soon as the owner opts out or asks us to stop.

It also respects noindex and nofollow, set either in a <meta name="robots"> tag (or name="truoffersbot") or in an X-Robots-Tag header. It won’t use pages marked noindex.

Removing imported offers

If you run a takeaway and don’t want your offers imported, send a removal request. It takes effect straight away: imported offers are taken down and we stop visiting the website.

Prefer to manage your offers yourself? Claim your listing and you can confirm, edit or remove anything imported from your website.