For shops: about our bot

Last updated 7 October 2026

DropHound tells collectors when UK shops list, open pre-orders for, or restock sealed trading card products, and sends them to your site to buy. To do that, a small, well-behaved bot reads a few of your public pages. Here's exactly what it does.

How to recognise it

Its user agent contains DropHoundBot and a link to this page. (Before this site went live it identified itself as CardAlertsBot.)

What it reads

• Only the categories for the games we cover, and from those it only keeps sealed products. Singles, accessories and everything else are ignored.
• Public pages and product data, the same things any shopper's browser loads. It never logs in, adds to basket, checks out or submits forms.
• On most shops, a few small requests a minute. Larger pages are read less often, and some shops only once an hour.

It follows your rules

• It reads your robots.txt every day and never requests a path it disallows.
• It honours Crawl-delay and waits between requests even when you don't set one.
• If your site challenges or blocks bots on certain pages, it doesn't try to get around that. It just doesn't read those pages.
• If your site returns errors, it backs off automatically.

To opt out

Add this to your robots.txt and the bot will stop visiting within a day:

User-agent: DropHoundBot
Disallow: /

Or email hello@drophound.co.uk and we'll take your shop off by hand, usually the same day.

Want to work with us?

If you'd rather give us a feed, tell us about prize draws or launches, or talk about anything else, email hello@drophound.co.uk. We'd like to hear from you.