MacNTrackBot
MacNTrackBot is the crawler for Mac & Track, a nutrition and macro tracking app. It collects the nutritional information UK restaurant chains publish for their menus, so people can log what they eat when they eat out.
What it fetches
- Public menu and nutrition pages, and nutrition-guide PDFs, from a fixed list of about 50 UK restaurant chains.
- It does not crawl the wider web, follow links off those sites, log in, submit forms, or collect personal data.
- Some menus are only rendered with JavaScript, so those sites are loaded in a headless Chromium browser. It never downloads images, fonts or media.
How often
Once a day for each restaurant, plus the occasional one-off run when a menu parser needs fixing. It works through one site at a time and one menu page at a time, waiting at least a second between menu pages, or longer if your robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay.
How the data is used
The nutritional values (calories, macros, sugar, salt, fibre) are shown in the Mac & Track app and published through the Nutritional API, and each item keeps a record of the page it came from. Nothing MacNTrackBot collects is used to train AI models.
Identifying MacNTrackBot
- User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MacNTrackBot/1.0; +https://macntrack.app/bot)- Signatures
- Every request is signed with HTTP Message Signatures (Web Bot Auth), with
Signature-Agent: "https://macntrack.app". - Public keys
https://macntrack.app/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory
MacNTrackBot does not use a fixed set of IP addresses, so verify it by its signature rather than its IP. A request that claims to be MacNTrackBot without a valid signature from one of the keys above did not come from us.
Contact
If MacNTrackBot is causing you a problem, or you'd rather it didn't collect your menu, please email [email protected].