Zerowhen's bot
Polite, named, and easy to turn away.
Zerowhen watches web pages that people ask it to watch: a price, a restock, a status page, a school closure notice. When something changes, it tells them. Requests from Zerowhen's site checks say who they are:
User-Agent: Zerowhen/1 (+https://zerowhen.com/bot)What it does
- Only pages a person asked for. It doesn't crawl, follow links or build an index.
- Not often. A watched page is usually checked every few minutes to once a day, as the person chose.
- It reads your robots.txt (RFC 9309) before suggesting your site to anyone, and follows
a group for
Zerowhenif you write one. Following it in every scheduled check is being rolled out. - It takes no for an answer. If your site blocks it, it doesn't disguise itself or switch addresses. It tells the person to use your own alerts (price-drop or restock emails, saved searches) instead.
To ask it not to visit
User-agent: Zerowhen Disallow: /
Or email [email protected] with your domain, and we will stop.
A one-time survey (September 2026)
To learn how many sites let a polite bot in, we visited about 1,000 well-known sites once each: their robots.txt, then the home page (only if robots.txt allowed it). Nothing else, and no repeat visits.