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This page exists so that anyone auditing their server logs can find out, in one place, exactly what automated traffic TradeMatch sends to their website.
TradeMatch operates no web crawler. We send no automated requests to third-party websites. We do not scrape, spider, index or fetch your pages. There is no user-agent to allow or deny, because there is no bot.
We planned one. Our directory was going to enrich company listings by fetching each company's public website for a logo and a description, under the user-agent TradeMatch-DirectoryBot/1.0.
We cut it before it ever ran, for a reason worth stating plainly: the Companies House register does not publish a company's website address. To crawl a company's site, we would first have had to guess its domain from its name— and a guess dressed up as a fact is exactly the kind of thing that ends with the wrong company's logo on someone else's listing. We would rather ship a listing with no logo than a listing with a plausible one.
So the crawler was deleted rather than disabled, and this page documents the policy we actually operate rather than one we intend to.
It is not us. No TradeMatch software has ever sent the TradeMatch-DirectoryBot user-agent, or any other automated user-agent, to a third-party site. Anything presenting one is forged and unauthorised.
Please send the log lines to [email protected]. You are free to block it. We would like to know about it.
If we ever do operate a crawler, this page is updated before it sends its first request, and it will state:
It would honour robots.txt and identify itself honestly on every request. A bot that hides what it is has already decided it is doing something it should not.
The other direction is fine. Our public pages are open to search-engine and AI crawlers under the rules published in our robots.txt.
No. TradeMatch operates no web crawler of any kind. We run no spider, no scraper and no automated fetcher against third-party websites. If you are auditing your logs and looking for us, you will not find us, because there is nothing to find.
No. That user-agent string was reserved for a directory crawler we planned and then decided not to build. No TradeMatch software has ever sent it. Any traffic presenting that user-agent is not us and is not authorised by us — please report it to [email protected] with the log lines and we will confirm and publish the fact that it is a forgery.
The Companies House public register, read through its official API, and nothing else. That is the whole answer. See our unclaimed listings page for the detail.
There is nothing to block. A robots.txt rule aimed at us would have no effect because we send no requests to your site. If that changes, this page changes first, and the user-agent will be documented here before it makes a single request.