For website owners
Percentry's crawler
If you saw Percentry/0.1 in your logs, that was us. Our crawler reads the price transparency files hospitals are required to publish, so we can review them and report aggregate results.
What it requests
It starts at a hospital's /cms-hpt.txt file, the one CMS uses to find a hospital's price file (45 CFR 180.50), and follows the price-file links listed there. It may also read the home page, to find the "Price Transparency" footer link, and the page that links to the file. It reads the first 16 KB of a price file to learn what the file covers before downloading the whole file.
It doesn't log in, fill in forms, or request pages that aren't public.
How it behaves
- It sends one request at a time to a website, with a pause of at least one second between requests.
- It reads and follows
robots.txt, including aCrawl-delayof up to 60 seconds. - It never retries a refusal (401, 403, or 429) and never tries to get around one. A refusal is reported as a refusal.
- For files it has downloaded before, it asks only whether the file has changed.
To limit or block it
Use the product token Percentry in your robots.txt. For example, to block it from your whole site:
User-agent: Percentry
Disallow: /It also follows rules written for PeachAudit, the name it used before October 2026, so you don't need to change a rule you already have.
Contact
Questions, or a problem with how the crawler behaved on your site: emailhello@percentry.com. Please include the date and your site's address.