About GearhoundBot

GearhoundBot is the price-monitoring crawler operated by Gearhound (Montréal, Québec). It checks a small, fixed list of public product pages on behalf of independent outdoor retailers who subscribe to our market-intelligence service.

What it does

• Requests specific, publicly accessible product pages — typically fewer than two dozen pages per site, at most a few times per week.
• Reads the listed price, stock status, and promotion text. Nothing else is extracted or stored.
• Identifies itself honestly on every request: GearhoundBot/1.0 (+https://gearhound.org/bot; hello@gearhound.org)

What it never does

• It respects robots.txt. Disallow us and we stop — no workarounds, no identity changes.
• It never requests pages behind logins, paywalls, or any access control.
• It waits at least 30 seconds between requests to the same site.
• It does not crawl or follow links; it only checks pages we have specifically configured after a human review of the site’s terms.

Control or contact

To block GearhoundBot, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: GearhoundBot
Disallow: /

Or email hello@gearhound.org and we will remove your site from monitoring, usually the same day.