startmebot

startmebot is the web crawler for start.me, a personalized start page service. It functions as an indexing crawler that visits websites to collect information for its bookmarking and content aggregation platform. The bot identifies itself in server logs with the user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; startmebot/1.0; +https://start.me/bot). Its purpose is to keep bookmarked content current by checking for changes, validating links, and gathering metadata like titles and descriptions.

startmebot is visiting your website because a user of the start.me service has bookmarked a page on your site or added your content to their personalized dashboard. When this happens, the bot will periodically check the bookmarked URL to ensure the link is still valid and to update its metadata. The frequency of visits depends on how many users have bookmarked your content. The bot's activity is a legitimate part of the service's function.

The purpose of startmebot is to support the start.me bookmarking and personal start page service. It validates links and collects updated metadata to enhance the user experience on the platform by displaying accurate titles, descriptions, and thumbnails for bookmarked content. For website owners, having your content properly represented on start.me can drive traffic when users click through to your site from their personalized dashboards. The bot serves the private needs of individual users, not a public search engine.

To prevent startmebot from accessing your website, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This will prevent the service from validating links to your site for its users.

To block this bot, add the following lines to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: startmebot
Disallow: /