About CouncilBeaconBot
If you run a NSW or Victoria council website and found this address in your logs, this page explains what our crawler is doing and how to make it stop.
What it is
CouncilBeacon is a free public-information site that brings together what NSW and Victoriacouncils publish — bin days, rates, contacts, meetings and recent notices — so residents can find it without knowing which page of which council site to look on. Every fact we show links back to the council's own page.
How to identify it
It sends this User-Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; CouncilBeaconBot/1.0; +https://councilbeacon.com.au/about-bot)
What it fetches, and how often
- Public listing pages only — news, notices, events, meetings, public exhibitions.
- Once a day, a handful of pages per council. No crawling of your whole site.
- It reads the page and follows nothing; it does not submit forms or log in.
- Before it requests anything from your site, it reads your
robots.txtand follows it (RFC 9309). If that file can't be read because your server errors or times out, it takes nothing from your site that day. - We store the headline and a link back to you — the article stays on your site.
How to stop it
Disallow CouncilBeaconBot in your robots.txt (it takes effect from the next daily run; a group for CouncilBeaconBot replaces your * rules for us), or email us at sunsunzhidong@hotmail.com and we will remove your council's pages from our list. We would rather you told us what you would prefer than had to block us.