Bot

SportsBracketBot

SportsBracketBot is the crawler behind SportsBracket. It collects publicly available competition details — name, date, location, sport and organizer — so athletes and coaches can discover events. This page documents exactly how it behaves.

Why this bot exists

SportsBracket brings public competition listings together in one place so athletes and coaches can find events to enter. When we list your competition we attribute the source and link straight back to you — the bot sends people to you, it never takes anything away. More visibility, more athletes who know your event exists, at no cost to you.

How to identify it

Every request the bot makes sends this exact user-agent string, which links back to this page:

SportsBracketBot/1.0 (+https://sportsbracket.org/bot)

It respects robots.txt

Before crawling a site, SportsBracketBot fetches and parses its robots.txt, honouring the Allow and Disallow rules for the most specific matching user-agent group (a group naming SportsBracketBot takes precedence over *). A path that a matching group disallows is never fetched.

If your robots.txt specifies a Crawl-delay, the bot waits at least that long between requests to your site.

It crawls gently

  • At least ~10 seconds between requests to the same site (more if your Crawl-delay asks for it).
  • It backs off when a site returns errors or looks busy, and pauses that source rather than retrying hard.
  • It re-checks each site's robots.txt at least once every 24 hours, so rule changes take effect quickly.

How to block it

Add a rule for SportsBracketBot to your robots.txt — we honour it:

User-agent: SportsBracketBot
Disallow: /

To disallow only part of your site, list those paths instead of /.

Want to work with us?

Two things we'd love to explore with organizers: take your event data as a direct feed or API — you decide exactly what's published — and, for coaches entering a whole club squad, let them forward those planned entries straight into your registration. This only ever works with you, not around you. Get in touch.

Questions or removals

If you organize an event and have questions about how it's listed — or want it taken down — see For organizers. We honour genuine requests.