RippleBot

What it is

Ripple Leads helps sales teams learn about local businesses before they call. When a customer's scan finds a business on Google Maps, RippleBot reads a few public pages of that business's own website, such as its home, about, services and contact pages, so the team knows what it does and who to ask for. A deeper look reads up to about ten.

It identifies itself as RippleBot/0.1 (lead research; +https://ripple-leads.com/bot/).

What it doesn't do

• It never logs in, fills in forms, or gets past a CAPTCHA, a paywall or a block.
• It reads one page at a time, a few pages per business, and doesn't come back unless a customer asks about that business again.
• It doesn't republish your pages. Customers see a short summary, with links back to the pages it came from, and photos stay on your site as links.
• It doesn't read LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Yelp pages.

How to stop it

RippleBot obeys robots.txt. To keep it off your whole site, add this to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: RippleBot
Disallow: /

A rule for every crawler (User-agent: *) applies to RippleBot too.

Have your business removed

To have your business removed from Ripple Leads altogether, email hello@ripple-leads.com with its name and website. We remove what every Ripple Leads customer had on it, and later scans skip it. Our privacy policy explains what Ripple Leads keeps about businesses.