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IronScout
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IronScout Bot

IronScout operates a web crawler that collects publicly available ammunition product and pricing data from retailer websites. The data powers IronScout, a pricing intelligence and price-comparison platform for ammunition. This page describes how the crawler identifies itself, how it behaves, and how to reach us.

Identity

The crawler always identifies itself with this User-Agent:

IronScout/1.0 (+https://ironscout.ai/bot; [email protected])

We never impersonate a browser or rotate identities. If you see traffic claiming to be IronScout without this User-Agent, it is not us — verify it cryptographically as described below.

Cryptographic verification (Web Bot Auth)

Every request the crawler makes is signed using HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421, Ed25519) under the Web Bot Auth scheme. Requests carry Signature, Signature-Input, and Signature-Agent headers, and the public key needed to verify them is published in our key directory:

https://www.ironscout.ai/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory

Because our crawler runs on shared cloud infrastructure, IP address is not a reliable way to identify it. The signature is: a request that verifies against the key in our directory is ours; one that does not is not.

Behavior

  • robots.txt is obeyed. Disallow rules are honored, and if robots.txt cannot be read we fail closed and do not crawl.
  • Declared crawl delays are enforced. A Crawl-delay directive is respected exactly, coordinated across all of our workers.
  • Request rates are conservative. Crawling runs in nightly batches at low, rate-limited request rates per site.
  • Only public product pages are fetched. The crawler reads publicly accessible catalog and product pages. It does not log in, submit forms, or access non-public content.

What the data is used for

Collected product and price data is used to build price comparisons, historical price context, and availability alerts for ammunition buyers. It is not used to train AI models.

Opting out

We honor robots.txt, so the fastest way to exclude IronScout is a directive for our user agent:

User-agent: IronScout
Disallow: /

You can also email us at [email protected] and we will exclude your site directly. Either route takes effect ahead of our next scheduled crawl.

Contact

Questions, concerns, or allowlist requests: [email protected]