RegFlagsBot
Last updated 21 October 2026
RegFlagsBot is RegFlags' web crawler, run by Steady Circuit Ltd. It visits car and van dealers' own websites to note which vehicles are for sale and at what price, so RegFlags can show how long cars take to sell and how prices change. If you run a dealership and want it to stop, see "Opting out" below.
How to recognise it
It identifies itself as RegFlagsBot/1.0 (+https://regflags.co.uk/bot) and connects from 18.169.162.206 (a UK server).
What it collects
From each vehicle advert: the make, model, trim, colour, year, mileage, price, fees and finance offers, what the advert says about owners, service history and MOT, how many photos it has and how long its description is, the advert's web address, and when it was listed, changed and removed. About the dealer: its name, website, group and franchises, and its approximate area (the postcode district only).
What it never collects
Personal details of anyone, including dealership staff; photos, descriptions or other text from adverts; anything from marketplaces such as AutoTrader, Motors, eBay, Gumtree or CarGurus, or dealer pages they host; private sellers' adverts; and anything behind a login.
How it behaves
It obeys robots.txt, both rules for RegFlagsBot and for all crawlers, including Crawl-delay. It fetches one page at a time from a site, waits at least 3 seconds between requests, and visits each site about once a day to see what has sold or changed price. It backs off when a site is busy or returns errors, and never tries to get round a block, a login or a CAPTCHA.
Your website's terms
Before collecting from a site, and about once a month after that (sooner if they change), RegFlags reads its robots.txt, terms of use and privacy policy, and doesn't collect from a site whose terms forbid it. Each time, it keeps a copy of those pages as a record of what they said.
Opting out
To stop it visiting your site, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: RegFlagsBot Disallow: /
To also have everything collected from your dealership deleted, email hello@steadycircuit.com from your business address. We'll confirm when it's done. We keep only a record that we did, and our copies of your robots.txt, terms and privacy pages, which show what they allowed while we collected.