What it is
BonaBot reads public pages of a website whose owner uses Bona and has chosen those pages, so that the owner’s Bona assistant can answer their customers’ questions about them. It identifies itself with this user agent:
BonaBot/1.0 (+https://bonasecure.co.za/bot)
What it reads
- Only addresses where the owner installed Bona and our installation check found their Bona tag. BonaBot can’t be pointed at someone else’s website.
- Only the pages the owner picked from their sitemap or menus, or pasted. It doesn’t follow links around the web.
- Only public pages, as an anonymous visitor: no cookies, no logins and no headers supplied by anyone. Sign-in, account, cart and checkout pages are never read.
- One page at a time, at most about one request a second per website, then again about once a week to see what changed.
The rules it always follows
- robots.txt: BonaBot obeys rules for
BonaBot, or for*when there are none for it, includingCrawl-delay. If robots.txt can’t be read because of a server error, it reads nothing. - noindex: a page with
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">or anX-Robots-Tag: noindexheader is skipped and nothing from it is kept. - Bona’s customers can’t switch either rule off.
How to block it
Add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: BonaBot Disallow: /
If you use Bona and your firewall or bot protection blocks BonaBot, the Assistant knowledge panel shows which pages it couldn’t read. Allow the user agent above if you want those pages read. We never try to get around a block.
What happens to the text
BonaBot keeps the readable text of each page, without navigation, scripts or hidden content, and removes anything that looks like a card or South African ID number. The text is stored for that website’s assistant only and is deleted when the owner removes the page or the site. Questions about it? Use the contact form.