AliaBot

AliaBot is the crawler behind Alia, an app that builds email and SMS signup popups for online stores. It reads a store’s own website so that the popups Alia builds for that store look and sound like the store.

When it visits

AliaBot only visits stores whose owners have installed Alia. It reads a store when its owner finishes setting Alia up, when they ask Alia to read their store again, and when Lia, Alia’s assistant, needs their brand to build a popup. It does not crawl the wider web, follow links off the store’s own domain, or revisit stores on a schedule.

What it reads

On each read, AliaBot opens a handful of pages:

• The homepage, plus one product page, one collection page and the about page, where the homepage links to them
• The store’s terms of service and privacy policy, so the popup can link to them and show the store’s legal name

From those pages it takes screenshots and reads the logo, colors, fonts, photography and the way the store writes. What it reads is used to design that store’s popups. It is not used to train AI models, and it is not shared with anyone else.

robots.txt

AliaBot obeys robots.txt. It follows the rules in a group for AliaBot, or the rules for * when there is no such group. To stop AliaBot reading a store, add:

User-agent: AliaBot
Disallow: /

How to recognize it

Every request AliaBot makes carries AliaBot/1.0 in its User-Agent, for example:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 AliaBot/1.0 (+https://intercom.help/alia-help-center/en/articles/16953643-allow-lia-to-pull-branding-from-your-site)

AliaBot also signs every request with Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, RFC 9421), so a site can check that a request really came from us:

• Signature-Agent: "https://app.aliapopups.com"
• The signature covers @authority and signature-agent, with tag="web-bot-auth"
• Our signed key directory is at https://app.aliapopups.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory
• Key ID: F7ZRNQHDLGkd2g4iHna9Raeq3VoPAB7-cB5T6aplTdE (Ed25519)

Allowing it through bot protection

If a store’s bot protection blocks AliaBot, the store’s owner can allow requests whose User-Agent contains AliaBot. The steps for Cloudflare and other providers are in this help article.

Contact

Questions about AliaBot: bill@alialearn.com.