CompareBuildersVerifier is the automated verification agent operated by Compare Builders. If you run a trade register, accreditation scheme or public directory and this agent has visited your site, this page explains what it was doing and how to confirm it was really us.
What it does, and why
Compare Builders verifies UK builders before they can win work on our platform, and keeps re-verifying them for as long as they stay listed. Part of that means checking the credentials a builder claims — membership and registration numbers — against the public register of the body that issued them. The verifier fetches the same public lookup pages a person would use, records the answer as evidence, and moves on.
- It only checks public information — register search pages and public lookups. It never attempts to log in, and it never submits forms other than the register’s own public search.
- It is low-volume by design — lookups happen when a builder applies or comes up for periodic re-verification. This is a verification service, not a crawler building an index.
- A refusal is respected — if a register blocks the request, the check is routed to our human verification team instead. Nothing retries aggressively.
How to verify it’s us
The agent identifies itself with this User-Agent, linking back to this page:
CompareBuildersVerifier/1.0 (+https://www.comparebuilders.com/bot)
Requests are also cryptographically signed under Web Bot Auth (IETF HTTP message signatures, RFC 9421): each request carries Signature, Signature-Input and Signature-Agent headers, and the public key is published at /.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. A User-Agent string can be forged by anyone; the signature cannot. If traffic claims to be us but does not verify against those keys, it is not us — please tell us.
Allowing or blocking it
We would rather be allowed by name than mistaken for a scraper. If your site sits behind Cloudflare, our signature keys let you allow the agent explicitly. If you prefer we not fetch your register at all, email us and we will route your scheme’s checks to our manual verification team instead — the check still happens, just by a person.
Contact
hello@comparebuilders.com — please include “verifier bot” in the subject line.