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For store owners

SectionaryBot, the crawler behind Sectionary.

If you found SectionaryBot in your logs, this is what it was doing and how to turn it off.

Last updated

It does

  • Visits public pages once, the way a browser does
  • At most a handful of pages per store: home, a collection or two, a product or two
  • Desktop and phone width, one page per second at most
  • Names itself in every request as SectionaryBot/<version>

It never

  • Signs in, adds to cart or places an order
  • Captures account, checkout or search pages
  • Collects personal data
  • Copies your code, images or files

Stop it in one step

Add this to your robots.txt. It is read again at the start of every run.

robots.txt
User-agent: SectionaryBot
Disallow: /

01Who we are

SectionaryBot is the crawler behind Sectionary, a reference library of real website and online-store designs, built by Blackbird.

02What it does

It visits public pages of online stores the way a browser does, once, and takes screenshots of those pages so designers can study how stores are built.

It captures at most a handful of pages per store (home, one or two collections, one or two products) at desktop and phone width, no more than one page per second, and identifies itself in every request as SectionaryBot/<version> with a link to this page.

03What it does not do

It never signs in, never adds anything to a cart or places an order, never captures account, checkout or search pages, never collects personal data, and never copies your code, images or files. The only things stored are our own screenshots plus public facts about the page (its address, the platform it runs on, the apps it loads).

04It respects robots.txt

Add this to yours and it will stop:

robots.txt
User-agent: SectionaryBot
Disallow: /

05Opt out or ask for removal

Send the store address to our contact address, which goes up here with our domain in the coming weeks. We add the store to a block list our crawler checks before every run and remove its screenshots within 48 hours.

06Attribution

Every screenshot in Sectionary names the store and links to the page it came from.