The Blackbox reader

When a business adds its brand to Blackbox, we read its website to fill in the brand: its name, logo, colours, and what it says about its products. This page describes that reader, so site owners and hosting providers can recognise it and allow it.

How it identifies itself

User-Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BlackboxBot/1.0; +https://blackbox.plus/bot)

IP address

138.199.200.59, the only address it reads from; also published as a list at blackbox.plus/bot/ips.txt.

What it reads

• The home page, and up to two linked pages on the same site, such as pricing, features or about.
• Up to two of the site's own stylesheets, for its colours and fonts.
• The blog's feed or sitemap, when the site has one.
• The home, pricing and features pages of a brand's competitors, which the brand names or Blackbox finds through search, read the same way.

It reads when someone adds or refreshes a brand, writes a brief, lists the blog's posts, or builds a strategy. It doesn't crawl a whole site, sign in or fill in forms, and it keeps at most 4 MB of any one page. When a home page turns it away or is built by scripts, it may ask Cloudflare's browser to load that one page once; that visit comes from Cloudflare's addresses, not ours.

It obeys robots.txt. Before reading a site it checks the site's robots.txt, and it reads nothing robots.txt asks BlackboxBot, or every bot, not to read. Nor does it send such a page to Cloudflare's browser.

Allowing it

If your site sits behind a bot check, such as Cloudflare, 20i StackProtect or Sucuri, allow the User-Agent and IP address above in its settings. Where the setting isn't yours to change, as with 20i, ask your hosting support to allow them.

Questions, or to ask us to stop

To stop it on your own, add this to your site's robots.txt:

User-agent: BlackboxBot
Disallow: /

Email hello@blackbox.plus with your site's address.