Research bot.
If you have seen BenjellounPartnersResearchBot in your server logs, this page explains exactly what it is and how to stop it.
Last updated: 21 August 2026
Who operates it
Benjelloun & Partners, an architecture studio based at City Walk, Building 9, Al Wasl, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The bot is operated by us directly. It is not a third-party service and the information it gathers is not sold or shared.
What it is for
We are a small studio and we keep our own record of the publications and journalists who write about architecture, design, construction and property in the Gulf. The bot helps us keep that record accurate — who currently edits a title, which desk handles press enquiries, and what a publication actually covers — so that when we contact an editor we do so correctly and only where it is relevant.
Its purpose is editorial research. Nothing else.
What it accesses
Only pages that are already public: mastheads, editorial team and about pages, author and contributor profiles, contact pages, and article listings such as sitemaps and feeds.
It reads article metadata — headline, date, byline, section, link. It does not store article text.
What it will never do
- It does not attempt to bypass a paywall, a login, or any access control.
- It does not attempt to defeat bot protection, and it does not disguise itself as an ordinary browser.
- It does not submit forms, create accounts, or send messages of any kind.
- It does not guess email addresses. If an address is not published on your site, we do not have one.
- It does not follow links off your domain to gather more.
How it identifies itself
Every request carries this user agent:
BenjellounPartnersResearchBot/1.0 (+https://benjellounpartners.com/research-bot)
How often
Rarely, and slowly. It leaves at least ten seconds between requests to the same site and stays well inside a few hundred requests per site per day. In practice a publication is looked at on the order of once a month, and a visit is a handful of pages, not a crawl of the archive.
robots.txt
We honour robots.txt. If your rules disallow a path for our user agent, or for *, we do not request it.
How to stop it
Add this to your robots.txt and it will stop:
User-agent: BenjellounPartnersResearchBot
Disallow: /
Or simply write to us and we will remove your domain from our list — you do not need to give a reason, and we will confirm when it is done.
Contact
Write to info@benjellounpartners.com with “research bot” in the subject line. If you want a record corrected or deleted, tell us and we will do it.