OttobrowseBot

Ottobrowse is a CRM. On its paid plan, an agent researches the companies a salesperson has added, and it reads the public web to do so. These are the automated agents it sends.

Account research. When a person asks the agent to research a company in their CRM, it reads that company’s own public pages: the home page and, when linked from it, the about, careers and news pages. That is at most four pages, one at a time, once per request. It reads them either with a plain request identifying itself as OttobrowseBot/1.0 or in a headless browser of its own, and in both cases it first checks robots.txt for OttobrowseBot and * and skips any page that disallows it. It also uses a web search provider for news and hiring, which does not fetch your site on our behalf.

Email checks. OttobrowseBot also fetches a single public page to confirm that an email address a search result attributed to it is actually published there. It fetches only pages it was given as citations, one request per page, and honours robots.txt the same way. If a published address sits next to a statement asking not to be contacted, it is treated as not contactable.

Ottobrowse/1.0 serves the job search that existing accounts still use. It reads public job listings on an employer’s own career pages, one request at a time, and honours robots.txt for Ottobrowse and *. It also reads the documented public JSON that applicant-tracking systems publish for their employers’ open roles; those are the systems’ own listing APIs, requested directly rather than crawled, so no robots.txt applies to them.

None of these agents logs in, submits a form, or follows links beyond the pages described above. None fetches job or professional networking sites whose terms prohibit automated access — LinkedIn and Indeed among them.

To block them, add User-agent: OttobrowseBot or User-agent: Ottobrowse with Disallow: / to your robots.txt.