ArcadeIndexBot

ArcadeIndex is an index of games you can play in the browser. Two automated agents visit game sites on our behalf. This page says who they are and how they behave.

The crawler

User agent: ArcadeIndexBot/0.1 (+https://arcadeindex.io/bot)

• It reads public game listings and feeds from a small set of sources that we have reviewed, and only after that review. It never logs in, never submits forms and never downloads files.
• It follows robots.txt (RFC 9309) for the ArcadeIndexBot token, cached for up to 24 hours. If your robots.txt answers with a server error or times out, we skip your site for that run.
• It opens at most one page every 2 seconds per site, one at a time. Game CDNs (itch.zone, hwcdn.net) get at most one page every 3 seconds with up to 3 at once. A Crawl-delay above 2 seconds is honoured.
• A site that answers our crawler with HTTP 403 is not crawled.

The verifier

User agent: contains ArcadeIndexVerifier

Before a game is listed, and every few days after, the verifier opens it in a sandboxed browser at desktop size to check that it loads, renders and responds, the same way it would be embedded on ArcadeIndex. Its visits are never counted as plays. It cannot reach private networks, grants no browser permissions and blocks downloads.

Submitted games

When a developer submits a game, we read that one page once to get its title. That request is not limited by robots.txt, because the submitter asked for it.

Opting out

To keep the crawler away from your site, disallow ArcadeIndexBot in your robots.txt. To remove a game that is already listed, use the developer opt-out, or claim the game and delist it from your dashboard.