FamilyPlansBot

FamilyPlans operates an automated crawler called FamilyPlansBot to keep our public dataset of UK family services accurate and current. This page documents how the bot behaves and how to contact us.

User-Agent

FamilyPlansBot/1.0 (+https://familyplans.co.uk/bots; contact: support@familyplans.co.uk)

What we crawl

• UK local-authority public pages relating to family services, family hubs, and library children's sessions.
• Public booking and activity pages of council leisure operators, after a documented eligibility review.
• Franchise and provider locator pages that are publicly available.
• Official UK government datasets (DfE, ONS, MHCLG) and Open Government Licence data.

What we do not do

• We respect robots.txt.
• We do not use anti-bot evasion, stealth plugins, or rotating proxies.
• We do not bypass authentication.
• We do not scrape private dashboards.
• We do not collect personal data about children.

Rate limiting

Default: 1 request per second per domain, 2 concurrent requests max. We adjust downward on 429/503 responses. Custom rates with partners on request.

AI crawlers and reuse of our content

The sections above cover FamilyPlansBot, which is outbound: it visits other sites to collect data. This section is the reverse direction - our policy for AI systems, search engines, and journalists reading and reusing FamilyPlans content itself.

Crawlers we allow

• Explicitly allow-listed in our robots.txt: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, and CCBot.
• The general-purpose search crawlers Googlebot, Bingbot, and DuckDuckBot are also allowed.
• Bytespider (ByteDance) is blocked. Any other crawler not named in robots.txt isn't blocked by default, but we'll add a specific rule if one behaves abusively.

Machine-readable access

Beyond the HTML pages, FamilyPlans publishes a plain-text summary at /llms.txt for LLM consumers, and a public facts API (for example /api/facts/venue/123) that returns the same checked facts shown on a page - source, last-verified date, and quality-gate decision - in JSON-LD shape.

Citing FamilyPlans

If you cite or summarise FamilyPlans data in an AI answer, article, or dataset, please link to the specific page you drew the fact from, not just the site root, and note the last-verified date shown on it where relevant.

Corrections and takedowns

If a fact attributed to your organisation is wrong, or you want a page corrected or removed, use /report-error. For the fuller process, timescales, and what we will not take down, see our /takedown-policy.

Contact

If you operate a site we crawl and you would like us to:

• Stop crawling
• Crawl differently (rate, frequency, paths)
• Use a partner API rather than scraping
• Correct attribution or remove your service page

Email abuse@familyplans.co.uk. We aim to respond within 2 business days. Our public source policy is at /methodology/sources and our source-challenge runbook is available on request via the same address.