The crawler behind the search on this site. If you found this address in your server logs, this page is for you.
OORTBot/1.0 (+https://oort2000.com/bot)
Every request carries that string. It is never disguised as a browser, and there is no second, quieter user agent.
It builds the index behind the search box on this site — 24,938 pages from 4 sites. Results are a title, a link to you, and a short description taken from your page. People click through and read it at your address, on your terms, counted by your analytics.
robots.txt before anything else and obeys it, longest-match, per RFC 9309.Crawl-delay. Where none is given it waits a second between requests anyway.429 or 503, honouring Retry-After.If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since on a re-crawl, so an unchanged page costs you a 304 and no body.This works immediately and needs no reply from anyone:
User-agent: OORTBot Disallow: /
Or narrow it to the parts you would rather keep out, the same way you would for any other crawler. It is read fresh at the start of every crawl, so a change takes effect the next time it visits.
A user agent is not proof of anything. Anyone can send that string, and this crawler runs from an ordinary connection with no fixed address range to check it against — so there is no reverse-DNS trick that will verify a visitor is really us. If something claiming to be OORTBot is hitting you hard, it is either misbehaving or not us, and a rate limit is a better answer than trust either way.
It is small and it is slow. One machine, one request at a time, a few thousand pages a night at most. If you are seeing real load from this name, something is wrong and it is worth telling us.
bot@oort2000.com. Requests to be removed are honoured without argument and without asking why.