ArkadeskBot

The bot behind Arkadesk, a marketing desk for small businesses and the agencies that run their marketing.

What it does

When a business owner (or their agency) sets up Arkadesk and types in their website, ArkadeskBot opens that site to learn the brand: what the business sells, its colours, fonts, logo and voice. It reads the home page and up to three more pages (about, services or menu, pricing, contact), once, while the person waits.

When an Arkadesk user researches other businesses (for example, local businesses that might need their services), ArkadeskBot may open each business's home page once to see which social profiles it links to.

It does not crawl the web, follow links off the site, build a search index, or use what it reads to train AI models.

How to recognise it

• User agent contains ArkadeskBot/0.1 (+https://bot.arkadesk.com). Pages are opened in a headless Chromium browser, so the full user agent starts with Chromium's own.
• Requests are signed with Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, Ed25519). Signature-Agent: "https://bot.arkadesk.com"; the public key is at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory.

How to control it

ArkadeskBot obeys robots.txt. It follows a group for ArkadeskBot if there is one, otherwise *, and respects Crawl-delay. To keep it out:

User-agent: ArkadeskBot
Disallow: /

If a site blocks it or asks it to stay out, ArkadeskBot stops and asks the person setting up for a screenshot instead. It never retries around a block.

Contact

Questions or problems: bot@arkadesk.com.