HealthyBiteBot

HealthyBiteBot reads restaurants’ public menus so that diners with food allergies and dietary needs can see which dishes may suit them.

What it does

When a diner looks for restaurants in the HealthyBite app, we may need a restaurant’s menu. HealthyBiteBot then visits the restaurant’s website, finds the menu, and reads the dish names and descriptions. HealthyBite marks each dish against the diner’s dietary profile and tells them to confirm with the staff. It may also fetch a picture from the website to show on the restaurant’s card.

It reads only public pages. It doesn’t log in, fill in forms or place orders.

How to recognize it

Its requests identify themselves with this user agent:

HealthyBiteBot/1.0 (+https://www.healthybite.app/bot)

Some menus are built by JavaScript, so it sometimes reads a page with a headless Chrome browser. Those requests use a Chrome user agent with the HealthyBiteBot token added to it.

It respects robots.txt

Before reading a site, HealthyBiteBot checks its robots.txt file and follows the rules for HealthyBiteBot and for * (all crawlers).

To block it from your whole site

Add this to the robots.txt file at the root of your website:

User-agent: HealthyBiteBot
Disallow: /

To block it from part of your site

User-agent: HealthyBiteBot
Disallow: /private/

How often it visits

• Only when diners search near your restaurant or open it in the app, and only when we don’t already have a recent copy of your menu.
• A menu it finds is kept for about 90 days before it checks again. If it finds none, it tries again after about 30 days.
• A visit reads a handful of files at most: usually the home page, the menu page, and a few menu files (such as PDFs) or menu images that page links to.
• It renders only one page at a time in a browser, across the whole of HealthyBite.

Removal and contact

If you want your menu, photos or images removed from HealthyBite, or if HealthyBiteBot is causing you a problem, email Healthybiteapp@gmail.com. For removals, see our Copyright page. We honor these requests. If your menu is out of date or a dish is marked wrongly, tell us and we’ll correct it.