Zerowhen

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:

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 Zerowhen if 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.