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Honest Funeral Co.

HonestFuneralBot: how we read funeral homes' price lists

HonestFuneralBot reads the price lists funeral homes post on their websites, such as their General Price Lists. The FTC's Funeral Rule says a funeral home must give this list to anyone who asks in person.

In California, a funeral home with a website must link from its homepage to the goods and services its price list covers, with a statement that the price list is available on request, or to the price list itself (Business and Professions Code section 7685).

We read them so that, once our directory is public, families can see a home's own prices, with the list's date and the date we read it, before they call.

What it reads

It reads a site's robots.txt first. Then it asks only for the price lists we already know about, at the addresses where we found them: a home's General Price List or price page, and its casket or vault price list if it posts one on its own. If an address sends it on to another one, it follows, and checks that site's robots.txt too. It doesn't look through a site for anything else.

How it behaves

  • It follows robots.txt: the rules for HonestFuneralBot and the rules for all crawlers, including Crawl-delay.
  • If a site refuses it, it stops. It never tries again under another name, from another address, or with another tool.
  • If a site's robots.txt can't be read because of a server error, it reads nothing from that site.
  • It waits at least 1.5 seconds between requests to the same site. It only reads pages: it never fills in a form or signs in.

How to recognize it

It names itself in every request. Its full user-agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; HonestFuneralBot/1.0; +https://honestfuneral.co/bot)

How to stop it

Add these lines to your site's robots.txt:

User-agent: HonestFuneralBot
Disallow: /

Or email corrections@honestfuneral.co. We stop reading the sites you name, confirm in writing, and don't start again without your written permission.

Something wrong about your funeral home?

Email corrections@honestfuneral.co, or see what we do about listings for funeral homes. For funeral homes