Site Access & Crawler Information

Published by Cognitive Allied Media. Last reviewed October 2026.

If you operate a website and have seen a request from Viv in your logs, this page explains who we are, why the request was made, what we do with what we read, and how to reach a person about it. It is written for site operators and is deliberately non-promotional.

Who we are

Viv is a research assistant for vintage resellers, operated by Cognitive Allied Media. Sellers use it to identify, assess, price and prepare listings for vintage items, initially jewelry and apparel. Viv is in prelaunch; access is limited to an early cohort of users.

Why Viv accesses public websites

When a seller asks Viv to research an item, Viv may retrieve publicly available pages to support that one request, in the same way the seller would open them in a browser. Typical purposes:

• Identifying a maker, product line or era from published references, museum and archive records, and collector guides.
• Locating comparable items that have been offered or sold, to inform a suggested price range.
• Checking hallmark, label and construction references.

Viv shows the seller which sources informed a result and links to them. It does not republish pages, build a public index, or serve third-party content as its own.

Information categories

Viv reads the public text and images on the pages it retrieves. It does not attempt to access anything behind a login, paywall, or other access control, and it does not collect personal information about site visitors or users of your site.

How to identify our crawler

Requests from Viv identify themselves with a User-Agent that includes the token VivResearchBot and a link to this page. The exact string, and the IP ranges requests originate from, will be published here when the crawler is deployed.

Access controls we honour

• We read and follow robots.txt. Disallow rules for VivResearchBot or for all agents are respected.
• Requests are rate limited and spaced to avoid load on your servers.
• We do not bypass logins, paywalls, CAPTCHAs or other technical access controls.

Source handling and retention

Pages are retrieved for the seller's specific request. We do not claim blanket permission to access or reuse all publicly visible material, and we treat your terms of use and rights notices as applying to us. Retrieved content is kept only as long as needed to complete and show the result to the seller; the retention period will be stated here once the deployed system is finalized.

Requesting restrictions or reporting unwanted access

If you would prefer that Viv not access your site, add a robots.txt rule for VivResearchBot, or email us and we will add your domain to our exclusion list. If you believe Viv has accessed your site in a way that conflicts with this page, please tell us: include the domain, the time window, and any log lines you can share, and we will investigate and reply.

Contact: david@cognitivealliedmedia.com. This address is monitored on business days.