Crawler policy · Last updated: September 2026
AccountBeat is a news monitoring tool for salespeople. Our users tell us which companies they sell to, and we watch the public news about those companies so they do not have to. AccountBeatBot is the part of that which reads your site.
Every request we make carries this exact User-Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AccountBeatBot/1.0; +https://accountbeat.com/bot)
The product token is AccountBeatBot. If you see traffic claiming to be
AccountBeat with any other user agent, it is not us — please
tell us and we will look into it.
Every request originates from one of these, and from nowhere else:
178.105.216.144/32 2a01:4f8:c015:75b4::/64
The machine-readable list lives at
accountbeat.com/crawler-ips.json, and both
addresses reverse-resolve to crawler.accountbeat.com
(forward-confirmed). If something claims to be AccountBeatBot from an
address outside this list, it is not us.
sitemap.xml, and the article pages listed in it, when your
listing page is rendered in the browser and has nothing for us to read.We read headlines, summaries, publication dates and the article URL. We link to your page; we do not republish your article text, and we do not use your content to train models.
Feeds are polled on a schedule, not continuously — most sources hourly, press
wires every fifteen minutes. We send If-None-Match and
If-Modified-Since on every request, so if nothing has changed you
serve us a 304 and no body. When a source starts failing we back off on a
steepening schedule up to 24 hours rather than retrying at the same rate.
We read /robots.txt before we fetch anything, and we obey it. Rules
addressed to AccountBeatBot take precedence over rules addressed to
*. We honour Crawl-delay: if you ask for ten seconds
between requests, you get ten seconds between requests.
To slow us down:
User-agent: AccountBeatBot Crawl-delay: 30
To keep us out of part of your site:
User-agent: AccountBeatBot Disallow: /private/
To block us entirely:
User-agent: AccountBeatBot Disallow: /
Changes take effect within 24 hours, which is how long we cache a
robots.txt before reading it again. If a site's
robots.txt cannot be read — it times out, or returns an error — we
treat that as no instruction rather than as permission to ignore one, and we do
not use it as an excuse to crawl a site that has told us not to.
Email crawler@accountbeat.com. If we are causing you a problem, we would rather hear about it and fix it than have you discover us in a log file. We will answer, and we will act on it — including removing your site entirely if that is what you want.