ABOUT OUR SCANNER

CharterBot

CharterBot is the website scanner behind Charter, a SmartSource Solutions product that gives credit unions a quarterly peer report on their digital front door. It looks at a credit union's public website the way a first-time visitor would.

What it looks at

On each visit, CharterBot loads:

your home page, at desktop and phone screen sizes;
your rates page, if the home page links to one;
up to two loan pages linked from the home page.

How much

That's at most about five page loads per visit. It takes screenshots and notes what's on each page: links and buttons, published rates, and disclosures such as the NCUA insurance statement.

What it doesn't do

It doesn't log in, fill in or submit forms, or open online banking.
It doesn't collect information about your members or your visitors.
It doesn't try to get past bot protection or CAPTCHAs. If your site challenges it, it stops and records that it couldn't complete the scan.

How often

A credit union's site is scanned when someone requests its free Peer Score, and about once a quarter for the Credit Union Digital Index. Each visit is a handful of page loads, spread out — never a crawl of your whole site.

What happens to what it sees

Scores for individual credit unions are private to that credit union. The Charter Index publishes only aggregate results by asset size, and never names or ranks an individual institution. Screenshots are kept in private storage.

Blocking CharterBot

CharterBot follows robots.txt. To keep it off your site entirely, add:

User-agent: CharterBot
Disallow: /

Allowing CharterBot

If your firewall or bot protection is blocking it and you'd like your site scored, allow this user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; CharterBot/1.0; +https://cucharter.org/bot)

Where it comes from

If you allow-list by IP address, CharterBot visits from:

2.25.145.132