GoodAppsJobsBot

• We read the public job-board feeds employers already publish — never your rendered HTML, and never anything behind a login.
• We check your robots.txt before every visit, and we honor it.
• We link people to your posting to apply. We never republish your description, and we never accept applications on your behalf.
• One request at a time, at most one every two seconds. We are a guest.
• Blocking us takes two lines in robots.txt, and takes effect on our next visit.

Every request we make carries this User-agent header:

GoodAppsJobsBot/0.1 (+https://career.thegoodapps.co/bot)

Anything claiming to be GoodAppsJobsBot from an address that does not resolve back to us is not us, and we would genuinely like to know about it.

Add this to your robots.txt. We re-read it on every visit, so there is no lag:

User-agent: GoodAppsJobsBot Disallow: /

If your server errors or times out when we ask for robots.txt, we treat that as a no and skip you entirely. We would rather miss a role than walk past a rule we could not read.

If you simply do not have a robots.txt, we read that the way the standard does and the way every other crawler does: no rules published, so nothing to break. Adding the two lines above is what changes our answer.

Prefer to keep us out of one section only? A path-scoped Disallow under the same User-agent: GoodAppsJobsBot works exactly as you would expect. Note that once you write a group naming us, that group is the only one that applies to us — the wildcard User-agent: * rules no longer do. That is what the standard says, and it is how we read it.

You can also just ask. Email ben@thegoodapps.co from an address at your domain and we will remove your listings and stop visiting. No form, no account, no negotiation.

Applicant-tracking systems — Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, SmartRecruiters and others — publish a JSON endpoint listing a company’s open roles. That endpoint exists so that job boards, aggregators and your own careers page can read it. It is what we read.

We do not scrape your rendered markup, and we do not guess at links in your HTML. Reading a format you maintain on purpose is stable for you and honest of us; parsing your page layout would break every time you redesign and would read a lot more like taking than being given.

From that feed we keep the role’s title, location, department, posting date, a stable identifier, and the URL where somebody applies. We fetch the description once and store it privately so we can summarize it. We do not collect personal data of any kind — not your recruiters’ names, not your employees’, not anyone’s.

A short summary in our own words, the facts your feed already states publicly, and a link to your posting. Your description stays yours: we never reproduce it, and we do not put your roles in search engines’ job results — your own page is the canonical listing, and we are not going to compete with you for your own job.

When a role stops appearing in your feed, we close it the same day. A job board full of positions that were filled in March is the thing job seekers hate most about job boards, and your feed is the authority on which of yours are still open.

Claim your organization and you get direct control: switch ingestion off entirely, correct anything we got wrong, or adopt the listings we found and run them through the full pipeline here — applications, response-time commitments, a named hiring manager. That last one is opt-in and always will be. We will never sign you up for obligations you did not agree to on the strength of having read your careers page.

One request every two seconds per host, enforced across the whole crawl rather than per worker — so running more of them speeds us up across employers and never speeds us up against you. A typical company is a handful of requests a day.

If that is still more than you want, say so and we will slow down or stop. The goodappsjobsbot token in your robots.txt is the fastest way, and email works too.