WivWav Crawler Info

What is WivWav?

WivWav is a free search index for wheelchair accessible vehicles (WAVs). Our crawler visits publicly accessible listing pages across many independent websites and lets people search across all of them in one place, the way a general search engine indexes pages from across the web.

Our user-agent

Our crawler identifies itself with the following user-agent string:

WivWav/1.0 (+https://wivwav.com/bot)

You can match this string in your server logs to identify our traffic. If this string ever changes, we will update it on this page first.

What we collect

From each listing page we crawl, we collect publicly visible vehicle listing details — things like price, mileage, location, vehicle facts (make, model, year), and the listing’s photos and description as published on the page. We do not create an account, log in, or access anything that isn’t already visible to any visitor.

What we do with it

Collected details are indexed for search and shown to WivWav users as summarized facts and short snippets in search results. Every listing we show links back to the original page on your site — WivWav is a discovery layer that sends visitors to you, not a destination that replaces a visit to your site.

robots.txt compliance

Our crawler checks robots.txt before requesting any page on your site and honors every Disallow rule that applies to it, including rules written specifically for our bot by name (see below). A missing or unreadable robots.txt is treated as fully open, never as a reason to skip the check.

Crawl rate

We pace our requests conservatively and add randomized delays between them, so our crawler never bursts a large volume of traffic at one site. We also honor a site’s explicitly declared Crawl-delay directive where one is set.

How to block just WivWav

If you’d like to exclude only our crawler without affecting search engines or other bots, add a block targeting our user-agent name to your robots.txt:

User-agent: WivWav
Disallow: /

We check for this on every crawl and will stop requesting your site once it’s in place. You can also scope the block to specific paths instead of your whole site by listing them under Disallow individually.

What we never do

Our crawler never logs in, creates an account, or agrees to any terms of service to access a page. If a site blocks us — through robots.txt, an IP block, a CAPTCHA, or any other access control — we stop and do not attempt to get around it.

How WivWav is funded

WivWav is currently free to use, with no ads. If hosting and infrastructure costs ever require it as the service grows, we may introduce minimal, non-intrusive advertising to cover those costs — not as a business model built around competing with the sites we index.