# BallastBot reads public contact pages, and stops when you ask

> BallastBot reads a business's public contact pages when a Ballast customer looks it up. What it reads, what it keeps, and how to keep it out with robots.txt.

Canonical: https://ballast.to/bot
Last updated: 2026-11-08

BallastBot

Ballast is a cold email platform. Its lead finder helps customers find local businesses on OpenStreetMap, and BallastBot reads those businesses' own websites for the contact details they publish.

## Spot it in your logs

Every request carries this user agent:

User-Agent

```
BallastBot/1.0 (+https://ballast.to/bot)
```

## What it reads

- Your homepage and up to 6 pages that usually list contact details: contact, about, team, imprint, legal. Nothing behind a login, no forms, no search boxes.
- One request at a time, half a second apart, and at most 1.5 MB a page.
- Only when a Ballast customer picks your business in the lead finder and asks for its contact details. It doesn't crawl the web on its own.
- Your robots.txt first, every time. A Disallow for BallastBot, or for every crawler, means it reads nothing.

## What it keeps

- Email addresses your site publishes, marked as a company address (info@, office@, booking@) or a person's own.
- Phone numbers and links to your social profiles.

### What it never does

- Guess addresses from names or patterns.
- Check whether an address exists by talking to your mail server.
- Collect people's names from team pages.
- Share what it found with anyone but the customer who asked, or reuse it for another customer. Results are deleted after 90 days.

## Keep it out

Add this to your robots.txt. It takes effect on the next read, with no delay:

robots.txt

```
User-agent: BallastBot
Disallow: /
```

Can't edit robots.txt? Write to [contact@ballast.to](mailto:contact@ballast.to?subject=BallastBot) with your domain and we'll add it to the list BallastBot never reads.

## Got an email you didn't want?

It came from a Ballast customer's own mailbox, not from us. Every email has a way to unsubscribe, and a no stops every campaign of that customer for good. If it looks like spam, send it to [contact@ballast.to](mailto:contact@ballast.to?subject=Abuse%20report): our [Acceptable Use Policy](https://ballast.to/legal/acceptable-use) holds the sender to the rules in the recipient's country, and we hold or close accounts that break it.