Athath

A public, auditable standard

Crawl ethics

Reach is not a license to be abusive. Abusive crawling is a legal and brand risk to the very trust moat we build on. This standard is binding on our crawler and source-onboarding pipeline.

In the open

How the catalogue is built

Four honest steps, from a public source to the product in front of you — exactly what we do, and what we don’t.

  1. 1

    We discover public listings

    We find furniture on Egyptian shops’ own public, indexable pages — the same pages a shopper or a search engine can already see. No private or logged-in content.

  2. 2

    We read them gently

    A truthful crawler, per-source rate limits, backoff on errors, and full respect for robots.txt and Terms of Service. We never hammer a site or evade its defenses.

  3. 3

    We extract and clean the data

    We read price, availability and details from the public page, normalise them, and label freshness honestly — keeping our own catalogue clean (an aggregate quality sweep we publish on /transparency).

  4. 4

    We link you back to the shop

    athath is a discovery layer, not a store: we don’t sell, don’t hold inventory, and don’t take a cut. Every product links out to the shop’s own page to buy — no cart, no pressure.

Inspect exactly what the catalogue covers — and where it’s thin →

  1. 1

    Respect robots.txt and Terms of Service

    Sources that disallow crawling are not crawled. We record the robots/ToS status of every source.

  2. 2

    Identify ourselves honestly

    A truthful User-Agent with a contact URL. We never spoof a browser or human to evade detection.

  3. 3

    Be gentle

    Per-source rate limits, respectful pacing, and backoff on 429/503. We never hammer a site.

  4. 4

    No hostile circumvention

    We do not defeat CAPTCHAs, bypass auth/paywalls, or break anti-bot protections. Headless rendering reads public JS pages — never to evade defenses. If a site blocks us, we back off.

  5. 5

    Public data only

    Only publicly accessible catalog, price, and availability data. No personal data, no logged-in or private content.

  6. 6

    Opt-out and contact path

    Sites can ask to be removed or rate-adjusted at crawl@athath.online, honored promptly.

  7. 7

    Attribution and honesty

    We link back to the source product page, never misrepresent provenance, and label catalog freshness honestly.

Scope

Today we crawl within Egypt only. Any geo-appropriate egress or proxy use (when added) stays within ToS-respecting, rate-limited bounds — never to evade a site that has asked us not to crawl.

Questions or requests? crawl@athath.online · Trust guarantees