🤖 Overview

yottacars_bot is a legitimate web crawler operated by YottaCars, a car search and aggregation platform that helps consumers browse new and used vehicle listings across thousands of dealer websites. Its sole purpose is to collect publicly accessible car inventory data—such as make, model, year, price, mileage, and VIN—and index it into the YottaCars marketplace, enabling users to compare offerings from multiple dealerships in a single interface. The bot was first documented in 2021 and is publicly listed on YottaCars’s official bot information page at https://www.yottacars.com/bot.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The crawler operates over HTTP/1.1 and sends requests at an average rate of one request every 2–3 seconds per domain, though it may burst up to 5 requests per second during initial discovery. It uses a rotating pool of IPv4 addresses owned by YottaCars’s cloud infrastructure provider (AWS and DigitalOcean) with netblocks such as 3.128.0.0/9 and 159.89.0.0/16. The bot follows robots.txt directives and supplements its crawl with an internal sitemap parser. It also sends an Accept-Language header set to en-US,en;q=0.9 and a Referer field that consistently points to https://www.yottacars.com. Requests are made using a modern HTTP client that supports gzip compression, as documented in YottaCars’s technical documentation at https://www.yottacars.com/robots.txt.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

yottacars_bot is explicitly designed to honor all Disallow directives found in a site’s robots.txt file. YottaCars publishes its own robots.txt mentioning a crawl delay of 5 seconds as a good practice, and the bot’s source code—viewable in its GitHub repository at https://github.com/yottacars/crawler—includes a custom module that parses robots.txt before every crawl request. Failure to find a robots.txt results in a default 3-second delay between pages.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User‑Agent string is Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YottaCarsBot/1.0; +https://www.yottacars.com/bot). A secondary mobile‑style User‑Agent, YottaCars/1.0 (Android; +https://www.yottacars.com/bot), is used for mobile‑optimized pages. The bot always includes the header X-YottaCars-Crawler: true in its requests, which can be used as a reliable fingerprint. The crawl frequency is steady and never exceeds 10 requests per second across all domains.

📊 Data Usage

Collected vehicle data is exclusively used to populate the YottaCars search engine, which allows consumers to filter, compare, and contact dealers. YottaCars does not sell the raw data to third parties nor does it train machine‑learning models on individual listings; data is stored in an indexed database with daily updates. According to YottaCars’s privacy policy at https://www.yottacars.com/privacy, no personal identifiable information from user‑facing forms is harvested by the bot.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Webmasters rate‑limit yottacars_bot because its sustained crawl can overload smaller dealer websites that lack proper caching. The recommended policy is a threshold of 20 requests per minute per IP, returning HTTP 429 after the limit; this aligns with YottaCars’s own guidance for fair access without blocking legitimate indexing.

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