TelintaleBot
Last updated: 20 October 2026
TelintaleBot is the web crawler of Telintale LLC. Telintale helps organizations understand geopolitical risk: what is happening in the world, and what it means for their business. TelintaleBot reads public news and official publications so that we can find and verify those events.
How to recognize it
Every request carries this User-Agent:
TelintaleBot/1.0 (+https://telintale.com/bot)
What it reads
- robots.txt, RSS and Atom feeds, sitemaps and home pages, to find new articles.
- Publicly available articles and official announcements: no page behind a login, a paywall or a subscription.
What we keep, and why
From each article we keep its headline, link and publication date, and the facts we extract from it: what happened, where, when and who was involved, with a short quotation as evidence. The article text itself is stored for up to 90 days so that those facts can be checked, then deleted. We do not republish articles, and we link to the original source.
How it behaves
- It obeys robots.txt, including Crawl-delay, and reads robots.txt again at least once a day.
- It makes one request at a time to a site, at least 5 seconds apart, or longer when your Crawl-delay asks for it.
- It reads at most 25 pages from a site in one run, and visits a site less often when it publishes less.
- It never tries to get past a login, a paywall, a CAPTCHA or any other bot check. If a site refuses it, it stops.
How to limit or block it
Add a rule for TelintaleBot to your robots.txt. To block it entirely:
User-agent: TelintaleBot Disallow: /
To slow it down, for example to one request a minute:
User-agent: TelintaleBot Crawl-delay: 60
Changes take effect within a day.
Contact
If TelintaleBot causes a problem on your site, or you want us to stop collecting from it, write to hello@telintale.com. Please include your site's address.