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U.S. Patent No. 12,236,477 — Patented Automotive Data Standardization Technology
OAV

OAV.io-User

OAV.io-User is the user agent OAV.io (One Answer View™, The Automotive Answer Engine™) uses on car dealers' websites. It visits a dealer's site only when a car shopper has asked OAV about a car that dealer is selling.

What it does

  • Reads a few public pages on the dealer's own website, such as the home page, the contact page and the page for the car the shopper asked about, to find how to reach the dealership.
  • When the shopper's question cannot be delivered by email, sends it through the dealer's own website contact form, as "OAV.io" / "AI Lead".
  • The email address it enters is an OAV relay address. The dealer's reply reaches the shopper through OAV, and the shopper's own email address stays private. Where a form requires a phone number, it enters OAV's line, 747-300-3235.
  • It does not solve CAPTCHAs. A form that needs one is not sent.
  • It does not crawl a dealer's inventory.

User agent

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; OAV.io-User/1.0; +https://app.oav.io/bot)

Verifying it is us

Requests from OAV.io-User are signed with HTTP Message Signatures (RFC 9421), using the Web Bot Auth profile. They carry Signature-Agent: "https://app.oav.io" with a Signature-Input and Signature header. Our public key is published at https://app.oav.io/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory.

robots.txt

OAV.io-User reads your site's robots.txt before any other page and follows it (RFC 9309). It uses the group for OAV.io-User when there is one, otherwise the * group. To keep it off your site:

User-agent: OAV.io-User
Disallow: /

A shopper's question for a dealer whose site is closed to OAV.io-User is then sent by email or phone only, where OAV has them.

How fast

A handful of pages for each shopper inquiry, and only for dealers a shopper has asked about.

Questions

Write to oavsupport@oav.io. Dealers can also tell OAV where to send future shopper inquiries from any OAV inquiry email.