PropertyVaultBot

Crawler information and opt-out — last updated July 2026

PropertyVaultBot is the web crawler operated by PropertyVault, a UK app that helps home buyers research and keep track of properties. If you have seen this user agent in your server logs, this page explains what it does, the rules it follows, and how to opt out.

PropertyVaultBot/1.0 (+https://propertyvault.co.uk/bot)

What we crawl, and why

We crawl estate agents' own public listing pages in a small number of pilot areas in the UK, so that we can show buyers using PropertyVault which properties are on the market. Every listing we surface links back to the agent's own website — the crawl exists to send buyers to you, not to replace your site. We extract listing facts (address, price, bedrooms and similar) and photo URLs; we do not republish wholesale copies of your pages.

We do not crawl property portals.

The rules the crawler follows

robots.txt is honoured absolutely. We fetch and honour your robots.txt before crawling and re-check it at least daily. A disallow for PropertyVaultBot (or for all agents) stops the crawl — no exceptions. We also respect Crawl-delay.
Low, polite request rate. At most one request every 2–3 seconds, over a single connection per site.
Overnight only. Crawling runs in an overnight window, away from your peak traffic hours.
No unnecessary re-downloading. We use conditional requests (ETag / Last-Modified) and sitemaps, so unchanged pages are not re-fetched.
Clearly identified. Every request carries the user agent above, which links to this page.

How to opt out

Option 1 — robots.txt (automatic). Add the following to your site's robots.txt; the crawler will stop of its own accord the next time it checks (within 24 hours):

User-agent: PropertyVaultBot
Disallow: /

Option 2 — email us. Write to bot@propertyvault.co.uk from your agency and we will exclude your site promptly. Opt-outs are recorded against your site permanently, so the crawler will not return — this mailbox is monitored.

Questions, corrections, or anything else about the crawler are welcome at the same address.