1.What the agent is
Cara One is a health assistant app made by Cara Technologies, Inc. When a member asks Cara One to do something on a website, such as check a price, find an open appointment, or fill in a practice's request form, a browser in our cloud opens that site and does it for that one member. That browser is the Cara One agent.
It is software, not a person, and it says so on every request. It does not crawl, index, or collect sites in bulk, and it does not train any model on your pages.
2.How to recognize it
User agent
Every request carries the browser's own user agent, including "HeadlessChrome", followed by this token:
Agent/CaraOne (+https://www.caramedical.com/agent)
Network address
Requests come from 54.89.199.116 (Amazon Web Services, us-east-1). We will update this page before that address changes.
3.What it does and does not do
- It visits a site only because a member asked for something there.
- It checks robots.txt before it opens a page and again on any page it lands on, and leaves a page robots.txt does not allow, as described below.
- It opens at most 30 addresses or links a minute on any one site, across all members, and stays away for an hour when a site keeps blocking it.
- It never solves a captcha or other person check. If a site asks for one, the member may complete it themselves, or the agent stops and suggests another way, such as calling the practice.
- It never sends a message, books, cancels, or pays unless the member has approved that step in the app.
- It does not open search engines, or booking marketplaces we have no agreement with.
4.Limiting or blocking it with robots.txt
The agent reads your robots.txt and follows the group for CaraOne, or the * group when there is none. To keep it off your whole site:
User-agent: CaraOne Disallow: /
A change can take up to an hour to reach the agent. If robots.txt cannot be read (an error, a refusal, or a timeout), the agent does not open the site. A missing robots.txt (404) allows it.
5.Contact
If the agent causes a problem on your site, or you would like it to work differently there, email hello@caramedical.com with "Cara One agent" in the subject. Cara Technologies, Inc., 1266 Treat Ave, San Francisco, CA 94110.