Openauto Bot

Openauto Bot is Openauto's web crawler. It reads the cars for sale on New Zealand dealer websites so people can find them through Openauto search. Every car we show links straight back to the dealer's own listing, so enquiries go to the dealer.

What it collects

• The facts of each car for sale: make, model, year, kilometres, price, body, fuel, transmission, drive, engine size, colour, seats and the town or city where the car is.
• The address of the listing and of its main photo.
• The VIN, when the dealer publishes it, only to spot the same car listed in two places. We don't show it.

It does not copy listing descriptions, and it does not collect staff names, phone numbers or email addresses. Photos are not copied or stored: they load from the dealer's own website.

How it behaves

• It follows your robots.txt. It answers to the user-agent token OpenautoBot, and to rules for all crawlers (*) when there are none for it.
• It requests one page at a time and waits at least three seconds between requests to your site, or longer if your robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay.
• It visits once a day, between midnight and 3 am New Zealand time. After the first visit it reads your stock list and opens a car's own page only when the car is new or its price or kilometres have changed.
• If your site asks it to slow down (HTTP 429 or 503), it waits, and stops for the day if you ask again.
• It identifies itself with this user agent:
  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OpenautoBot/1.0; +https://openauto.co.nz/bot)

How to opt out

To stop Openauto Bot reading your site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: OpenautoBot
Disallow: /

To have your cars removed from Openauto, or to ask about anything we show, email compliance@openauto.co.nz from your business address. We remove cars within two business days and stop visiting your site.

Dealers can also claim a free showroom to check how their cars appear. Get in touch at the same address.