Mainspring reader

About our reader.

If you have seen MainspringReader in your server logs, this page explains what it is, how it behaves on your site, and how to reach us or ask it to stop.

What it is

A reader of public pages, run by AI Potential.

Mainspring is a tool we are building that gathers the public facts about one company, for that company's own use: what it says about itself on its website, what the public register says about it, and what the regulators and trade bodies in its sector have published. MainspringReader is the part that reads those pages.

It reads only pages that are already public. It never logs in, never fills in a form, never clicks through a consent screen and never runs a page's scripts to reveal more. Every fact it keeps is stored with the page address and the exact sentence it came from, so a person can open the same page and check it.

How it behaves

Identified, polite and slow.

It says who it is. Every request carries a user agent that names the reader and links to this page: MainspringReader/0.1 (+https://aipotential.ai/mainspring-reader).

It respects robots.txt. If your robots.txt disallows a path for all user agents or for MainspringReader, the reader does not fetch it.

It goes slowly. One request at a time, no more than one per second to any site, and each page once. It does not crawl your whole site in a burst.

It takes no for an answer. If a page returns an error, a login wall, a paywall or a CAPTCHA, the reader records that the page could not be read and moves on. It does not retry through a proxy, a cache, an archive or a third-party service.

It stays off some sites altogether. It never requests LinkedIn or Google Business Profile pages.

It publishes nothing. The reader cannot post, send, edit or publish anything. What it reads goes only into a private record for the company it is reading about.

If you would rather it did not read your site

Two ways to say so.

Add these two lines to your robots.txt and the reader will stay away:

User-agent: MainspringReader
Disallow: /

Or email support@aipotential.ai with your domain and we will stop reading it.

Contact

Questions about the reader.

Email support@aipotential.ai or call 01273 011 482. The reader is operated by AI Potential, Brighton.