The My Local Obits Crawler

For funeral homes, cremation services and the companies that build their websites.

What It Is

My Local Obits™ is a free, non-commercial service that shows people the obituaries recently posted by funeral homes and cremation services in the towns they follow. Every name links straight to the official obituary on the funeral home’s own website, where families find service details, guest books, flowers and memorial gifts.

How It Identifies Itself

Every request carries this user agent:

MyLocalObits/1.0 (+https://mylocalobits.app/bot.php)

It never presents itself as a web browser or as any other service.

What It Reads

Public obituary listing pages and, where needed, the individual public obituary pages they link to.
The site’s home page, when a funeral home is first found, to learn its name and address.
From each obituary it keeps only the name, the dates of birth and death, the age, the town, a veteran note when given, and the link to the page.
It does not copy obituary text, photographs, guest book entries or anything behind a sign-in.

How Often and How Gently

It follows each site’s robots.txt before reading any page.
It asks one site for one page at a time, with a pause between pages, and skips lists that have not changed since its last visit.
Where many websites share one server, it never has more than 4 requests open to that server at once, or makes more than 120 a minute, however many sites the server hosts.
A funeral home’s listing is checked about every 15 minutes; a new obituary page is read once and not again.

Limiting or Blocking It

Add these lines to your site’s robots.txt to keep it out entirely:

User-agent: MyLocalObits Disallow: /

Or name only the paths you want left alone. The crawler reads robots.txt again at least once a day.

Allowing It

If your site sits behind a firewall that turns away automated visitors, you can allow requests whose user agent begins with MyLocalObits. Requests come from the server at 72.52.133.228, 209.59.170.134; the current list is published at bot-ips.json.

Questions or Corrections

Write to mylocalobits@directorscorner.app. Requests to stop reading a site are honored right away.

For Funeral Homes

Each name links to the official obituary on the funeral home’s own website. We list the name, town and date only.