SquawkBot

A small web crawler operated by Volo. Last updated 27 October 2026.

What this is

If you are reading this, you probably saw SquawkBot/0.1 (+https://squawk.voloops.com/privacy) in your web server logs. SquawkBot is run by Volo, a company that makes scheduling software for flight schools. It visits the public websites of flight training businesses in the United States to find business contact details and to learn which scheduling software a school uses, so that we can reach out to schools that might want ours.

What it fetches

• Public pages only: a school's home page and a handful of pages linked from it, such as contact, about, team and instructor pages. At most six pages per site per visit.
• It never logs in, never submits forms, and never runs scripts.
• It reads at most 2 MB of each page and gives up after 20 seconds.

How it behaves

• It reads your robots.txt before every visit and obeys it, including Crawl-delay.
• It waits at least two seconds between requests to the same site.
• It keeps a copy of each fetched page for seven days so it does not fetch the same page twice in that time.

What it keeps

• Business contact details found on the page, such as a school's office email address, with the page address and the exact text the detail came from.
• The name of the scheduling product a site links to, if any.
• Street addresses are not stored. Postal codes are shortened to their first three digits.
• Records that were never used are deleted after ninety days.

How contact details are used

A person at Volo reviews every record before any email is sent, and nothing is sent automatically. Every message we send says who we are, includes a postal address, and includes a working way to opt out. If you opt out, we stop and we keep only a one-way fingerprint of your address so that we never add it again.

How to keep SquawkBot off your site

Add these two lines to your robots.txt. SquawkBot will stop visiting on its next check.

User-agent: SquawkBot
Disallow: /

Or email us at the address below with your site's address and we will exclude it by hand.

How to have your details removed

Email us at the address below with the email address or the site you want removed. We delete every record we hold about it, including the page copies it came from, and keep only the one-way fingerprint that stops it being added again.

Contact: squawk@voloops.com

Volo, voloops.com