How RateAutoPilot reads listings

RateAutoPilot helps short-term-rental owners price their own properties. There are two ways an owner can bring their listing in, and they are genuinely different — one runs on our servers, one never touches them. Both are described here, because a page that documented only the quieter one would be worse than no page at all.

1. Browser import — the owner’s own browser

This is the path most owners use. The owner drags a bookmarklet to their bookmarks bar, opens their own listing while signed in to their own session, and clicks it. The script runs in their browser, as them, reads the page they are already looking at, and copies the result to their clipboard for them to paste back to us.

It reads more than the search-engine layer, and we would rather say exactly what: the guest rating breakdown by category, the amenity list, guest capacity, and — where the page carries them — minimum stay and Superhost or Guest Favorite flags. It does not read the availability calendar or the fee schedule: Airbnb loads those separately when a visitor picks dates, so they are simply not on the page when the script runs. Availability comes from the calendar export link instead, described below.

• Our servers make no request to the marketplace on this path. No crawler, no user-agent, nothing for a platform to rate-limit — because there is nothing to rate-limit.
• We never ask for, receive, or store a marketplace login or password.
• It runs only when the owner clicks it, on the page they have open.
• Nothing is transmitted until the owner pastes it back and confirms every field.
• An owner can skip it entirely and use option 2, or type their details in by hand.

We think this is the right default because it keeps our infrastructure off the marketplace entirely. We also recognise it moves the action to the owner, and that a platform may see that differently from how we do. If you operate a marketplace and want to discuss it, the address below is monitored.

2. Link import — one request from our servers

If an owner cannot use a bookmarklet, they can paste their listing link and confirm they own or manage it. We then make one request to that single listing page and read only the public metadata the page publishes for search engines — Open Graph tags and JSON-LD. This is the path that produces the user-agent below.

• One request per listing, on explicit owner action. No crawling, no discovery, no bulk collection.
• We never request competitor listings, use a marketplace login, or bypass any access control.
• We identify ourselves honestly and never present as a browser we are not.
• We respect robots.txt and do not request disallowed sub-paths.
• It reads less than option 1 — no calendar, no rating breakdown, no amenities — because that is all the search-engine layer carries.

Our user-agent, which resolves to this page and carries a working contact address:

RateAutoPilotBot/1.0 (+https://rateautopilot.com/bot; owner-authorized listing import; contact: hello@rateautopilot.com)

3. Calendar import

An owner can also paste their calendar export link. Airbnb’s robots.txt explicitly allows /calendar/ical/, and the secret in that URL is generated only from the owner’s own dashboard — possession of the link is the ownership proof. We fetch only from a fixed allowlist of marketplace and property-management hosts, over https only, and we do not follow a redirect off that allowlist.

Contact

Questions, a correction to this page, or a request to be excluded: hello@rateautopilot.com. We respond to platform requests within one business day. If you tell us to stop, we stop — we do not require a legal instrument first.