hankbot

What hankbot does

hank is a reverse marketplace for automotive parts. When a user is looking for a specific part, hankbot visits product pages on your website to check whether the listing is still active and to read the current price.

This helps us show accurate, up-to-date information instead of linking to sold-out or removed listings.

How hankbot behaves

• Low volume - hankbot visits individual product pages. It does not crawl your entire site or build a full index.
• Rate limited - at most one request per second per host, and hankbot honours the Crawl-delay directive in your robots.txt.
• Transparent - every request uses the user agent hankbot/1.0 (+https://hank.parts/hankbot).
• Minimal data use - hankbot reads page text to extract availability and pricing. It does not index your site or republish your content.

Why whitelist hankbot?

When hankbot can access your product pages, your listings may appear in availability reports shown to hank users. This means:

• Free exposure to buyers actively searching for your parts
• No integration needed - hankbot reads your existing pages
• Qualified traffic - users who find your listing on hank are already looking for that exact part

Controlling hankbot

robots.txt

hankbot fetches and obeys your robots.txt before every request, matching on the agent token hankbot. Rules addressed to * apply too; a group naming hankbot takes precedence over the wildcard group.

# Allow hankbot
User-agent: hankbot
Allow: /

# Block hankbot
User-agent: hankbot
Disallow: /

# Allow hankbot, but keep it out of one area and slow it down
User-agent: hankbot
Disallow: /checkout
Crawl-delay: 5

If your robots.txt answers with 401 or 403, hankbot treats that as a refusal and skips your site entirely.

Firewall / bot protection

To whitelist hankbot in your WAF or bot protection, use the user agent string:

hankbot/1.0 (+https://hank.parts/hankbot)

Contact

Questions or issues? Reach out at help@support.hank.parts.