For agency web and procurement staff

BidSignalBot

BidSignalBot reads public bid listings on government procurement portals so small contractors can get one daily email of the bids in their trade. Every bid we list links back to your official posting, where vendors register and respond.

How it identifies itself

Every request carries this User-Agent. We never disguise the bot as a browser.

BidSignalBot/1.0 (+https://trybidsignal.com/bot; contact: hello@trybidsignal.com)

How it behaves

• Obeys robots.txt (RFC 9309), including Disallow, wildcards and Crawl-delay. If your robots.txt can't be read because of a server error, the bot doesn't crawl your site that day.
• At most one request per second per host, and never more than two at a time. It slows down on errors and honors Retry-After.
• Once a day. The BidSignal alert service visits each portal once a day, early morning Eastern time.
• Public pages only. It never logs in, never registers as a vendor, never solves CAPTCHAs or security challenges, and doesn't use proxies. If a page asks for a login or shows a challenge, the bot stops and skips it.
• Links back to you. We show the title, dates and short summary you publish, and link each bid to your official posting.
• Never downloads documents. Plans, specs and addenda stay on your site. We link to the posting instead.

The same code, with the same limits and User-Agent, is also published as a data tool on Apify, where its users schedule their own runs.

How to opt out

Two ways, and either one works on its own:

• Email us at hello@trybidsignal.com with your domain. We add it to our exclusion list within minutes of reading your email, the bot skips it from then on, and we remove bids from your site that are already listed.
• Add a robots.txt rule. The bot checks robots.txt before it reads your pages:

User-agent: BidSignalBot
Disallow: /

Contact

Questions, corrections or takedown requests: hello@trybidsignal.com.

3047 Robeson Trace, Johns Island, SC 29455