KnifeWatcherBot

KnifeWatcherBot is the search-indexing bot operated by Knife Watcher (a service of BoNimbus LLC). It discovers and indexes public product listings on Japanese-knife retailer websites — title, price, and availability — so shoppers can search and compare across retailers and jump straight to the retailer to buy. Knife Watcher sells nothing — every purchase happens on the retailer's own website.

How to identify it

Our bot sends this exact User-Agent on every request, linking back to this page:

KnifeWatcherBot/1.0 (+https://knifewatcher.com/bot)

We identify ourselves honestly: KnifeWatcherBot sends the User-Agent above — not a web-browser User-Agent — and cryptographically signs every request (HTTP Message Signatures / Web Bot Auth), so you can verify the traffic really is us.

What it does — and doesn't

It fetches publicly available product and collection pages to read price, availability, and product details. It works gently (typically one page at a time, with delays). It does not log in, submit forms, add to cart, or attempt to reach checkout or any private area — it only reads public pages.

It honors robots.txt

KnifeWatcherBot obeys the Robots Exclusion Protocol in all its forms: Disallow rules (including query-specific ones), Allow longest-match precedence, and Crawl-delay. If a page is disallowed for our user-agent or for *, we skip it.

How to control or block it

To stop KnifeWatcherBot from indexing all or part of your site, add a rule to your robots.txt:

User-agent: KnifeWatcherBot
Disallow: /

We re-read robots.txt regularly and honor the change on our next visit. To request that your store be removed from Knife Watcher, added to an allowlist, or to ask a question, email bot@knifewatcher.com and we'll respond promptly.