PostnestBot

Last updated: October 15, 2026

PostnestBot is the web fetcher used by PostNest, a product of Elledyne Labs, Inc. If you saw it in your server logs, this page explains what it does and how to control it.

It identifies itself with one of these User-Agents, both carrying the PostnestBot token:

  • PostnestBot/1.0 (+https://postnest.io/bot) - the plain HTTP reader.
  • Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PostnestBot/1.0; +https://postnest.io/bot) - a headless Chromium browser, used to read pages that are drawn by JavaScript.

Its requests come from this IP address: [PUBLISH EGRESS IP]. If a request claims to be PostnestBot but comes from another address, it is not ours - please tell us (see Contact below).

What it does

When a PostNest user builds a brand, they can name websites to learn from - usually their own website, or the websites of brands they admire. PostnestBot reads a few public pages of only those websites, so PostNest can describe the site's visual style and tone of voice for that user: headings and body copy, colours, fonts, and the site's logo.

PostnestBot is not a general-purpose crawler. It reads pages only from the site it was asked to read (following that site's own redirect if its home page moves to another address), does not build a search index, and does not revisit sites on its own schedule. It runs only when a PostNest user asks it to. It runs on PostNest's own servers in Google Cloud, not on the user's computer, so its requests come from PostNest's published IP address above, not from the user's internet connection.

What it fetches

  • Only public pages that anyone can open without signing in. It never signs in, never submits forms, and never tries to get past a login, paywall, CAPTCHA, or other access control.
  • A small number of pages per site - about ten (a few pages may be read once by each reader), typically the home page, the about page, product pages, the blog index, and a few recent articles, using your sitemap when you have one.
  • Ordinary HTTP requests, and sometimes a real browser. The HTTP reader reads the page's HTML, the stylesheets it links to, and the site's logo image - including when those files are served from a separate host such as a CDN, whose robots.txt it also checks. It does not run JavaScript and sends no cookies. PostnestBot may also load the page in a headless Chromium browser, which runs your site's JavaScript and loads its styles, images and fonts the way a browser does. That browser does not hide that it is automated (navigator.webdriver is true, and the browser's own client hints, which identify headless Chrome, are sent unchanged).
  • Read-only. PostnestBot only loads and scrolls pages. It makes only GET and HEAD requests: it never submits forms, sends POSTs or beacons, clicks, types, signs in or accepts cookie banners. It never contacts analytics, advertising or session-recording services, so its visits should not appear in your analytics. It opens no websockets, runs no service workers, downloads no files and grants no permissions. Pages are capped at about 15 MB.
  • No kept cookies. The browser is isolated and thrown away after each reading session. It starts every session with an empty, temporary profile that holds nothing belonging to a PostNest user - no sign-in and no saved data. Cookies your site sets exist only in memory for that one reading session and are discarded afterwards; nothing is saved or carried into another session.
  • Never social media platforms. PostnestBot refuses to fetch pages on social platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, or YouTube, and their link shorteners), including public profiles. PostNest gets a user's own social posts only through the platform's official API, with that user's permission.

What happens to what it reads

What PostnestBot reads is used only to produce a brand analysis for the PostNest user who asked for it. It is not used to train AI models, is not sold, and is not shared with other PostNest users. PostNest keeps the resulting analysis (such as colours, fonts, and notes on tone), and the site's logo image, stored with that user's brand - not a copy of your site.

robots.txt

PostnestBot follows robots.txt, including Crawl-delay. It answers to the user-agent token PostnestBot. To keep it off your whole site, add these lines to your robots.txt:

  • User-agent: PostnestBot
  • Disallow: /

You can disallow specific paths in the same way. PostnestBot also follows the rules you set for all crawlers (User-agent: *) when there is no group specifically for PostnestBot. It checks robots.txt before every page, and before every request a page makes to any host; if robots.txt can't be reached (a server error or timeout), it treats the whole site as off limits. Without a Crawl-delay it waits at least half a second between pages, and it spends at most about 90 seconds per site with each reader.

Bot checks

If your site shows a CAPTCHA, a "verify you are human" page or a similar bot challenge, PostnestBot stops reading the site. It does not try to get past the challenge, does not retry and does not wait it out.

Screenshots

When the headless browser is used, it takes screenshots of the visible part of the pages it reads so the PostNest user who asked can watch a live view. Only the newest screenshot exists at a time, and only that user can see it. It is deleted when reading ends (and automatically within minutes if a reading is interrupted), is kept in a separate database that is never backed up, and is never logged, never sent to an AI model and never used for training.

Contact

If PostnestBot is causing a problem on your site, or you think something is fetching pages while pretending to be PostnestBot, email service@postnest.io with the affected site and, if you can, the time and requesting IP address from your logs.

Elledyne Labs, Inc.
17595 Harvard Avenue, Suite C #4001
Irvine, CA 92614
Email: service@postnest.io