You are most likely here because this address appeared in your server logs. This page says what visited you, why, and how to stop it.
Winnowed helps United Kingdom businesses find other businesses to contact. It reads the contact details a company publishes on its own website (the same page a customer would look at) and gives them to the person who asked. It visits each site a handful of times and does not come back often.
Every request carries this, and it has never claimed to be anything else:
Winnowed/0.1 (UK business contact research; https://winnowed.co.uk/bot) python-requests
An agent that identifies itself but gives no way to object is not much better than one that lies, which is why the address of this page travels inside it.
| Behaviour | What that means |
|---|---|
robots.txt is read and obeyed | Fetched once per host and cached. If it disallows a path, that path is not requested. |
| 1 request per second, per host | Any concurrency happens across different sites, never against yours. |
| At most 5 pages | The home page, then /contact, /contact-us, /about, /about-us. It stops as soon as it has what it came for. |
| It backs off | A 429 or a server error is met with a pause and a retreat, not a retry loop. |
| It reads only what is served | No forms are submitted, no logins attempted, nothing is downloaded but the page itself. |
It looks for the details a business publishes so that customers can reach it: a general email address, a telephone number, and a trading address.
Where the only address published belongs to a named person rather than the business (jane@ rather than info@), that address is discarded before it is written anywhere. The company still appears, with its website and telephone number, and the record says the address was withheld and why.
There is no setting to turn that off.
Whatever is read is written to the file of the person who asked for it, on their own computer. Winnowed keeps no copy. There is no central database of contacts here to be sold, queried, or breached, and there is no account holding one.
2 ways, and both are honoured.
Add a rule to your robots.txt. It is checked before every request:
User-agent: Winnowed Disallow: /
Or write to us at hans@winnowed.co.uk and say which domain to leave alone. It goes on a permanent list and is not visited again. You do not have to give a reason and you will not be asked for one.
The list of companies is the free Companies House bulk register, the public record of every registered company in the United Kingdom. Winnowed does not use officer records, and does not ingest them. A company number, a registered name, a town and an industry code identify a company, not a person.
The crawler is only ever pointed at the website a company publishes for itself. It does not follow links off that site, and it does not look for people.
If this crawler has behaved in a way this page does not describe (ignored a robots.txt rule, come back too often, or requested something it should not have), write to hans@winnowed.co.uk with the date and the requesting address. It will be looked at properly, and if the description here turns out to be wrong the page gets corrected too.
Winnowed