Platebreaker Bot

Platebreaker is a search engine that helps users find recipes which best match their nutrition targets and preferences. Our bot indexes recipe websites to build this search experience — users are always directed to the original recipe page.

For Recipe Creators

Platebreaker reads the structured recipe data (schema.org/Recipe JSON-LD) that recipe publishers already embed in their pages for search engines. We do not scrape page content or reproduce full recipe text. Recipe instructions are hidden by default — our search results always direct users to the original recipe page, driving traffic to creators.

Creators have full control over how their recipes appear in Platebreaker. Learn more on our creators page, or create a free account in the creator portal to:

  • Control what recipe information is displayed in search results
  • Verify domain ownership via DNS
  • Submit sitemaps for faster indexing
  • Set your preferred indexing frequency
  • Monitor indexing progress across your recipes
  • Enable or disable indexing and listing at any time

Bot Identification

User-Agent Platebreaker/1.0 (+https://www.platebreaker.com/bot) IP Address 18.223.218.0 Reverse DNS indexer-1.bot.platebreaker.com IP List (JSON) www.platebreaker.com/indexerips.json Verification Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures)

Crawling Behavior

  • Respects robots.txt directives, including Crawl-delay
  • Rate limited to under 1 request per second per domain
  • Identifies itself with a consistent User-Agent (no browser spoofing)
  • Cryptographically signs every request via HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421)

Verify a Request is from Platebreaker

You can confirm a request is genuinely from Platebreaker using any of these methods:

  1. Reverse DNS (FCrDNS): Run dig -x 18.223.218.0 +short — it should resolve to indexer-1.bot.platebreaker.com. Then verify the forward record resolves back to the same IP.
  2. IP Range Check: Compare the source IP against our published list at indexerips.json.
  3. Web Bot Auth: Verify the Signature and Signature-Input headers against our public key at .well-known/http-message-signatures-directory.

Allowing or Blocking Platebreaker

If your firewall is blocking Platebreaker and you'd like to allow it, see our firewall allowlisting guide with per-provider instructions.

To block Platebreaker from indexing your site, add the following to your robots.txt:

User-agent: Platebreaker Disallow: /

You can also allow indexing of specific paths only:

User-agent: Platebreaker Disallow: / Allow: /recipes/

Contact

Questions about Platebreaker's bot? Contact us at creators@platebreaker.com.