Brand search: how it works

For riders, and for brands and stores who saw our bot in their logs. Last updated: October 26, 2026

Brand search is a search bar on our deals page. A rider types one or more brand names plus what they want (for example Klim waterproof pants), and our server first asks those brands' own online stores for matching products. If the named brands give nothing back (no matches, we can't search them directly, or they can't be reached right now), the same search words then go to every other brand we can search directly: Klim, Aerostich, REV'IT!, Sidi, Belstaff, Pando Moto and Biltwell. The page says when it did this. Results are labelled "Results from the brand's own site, not size-checked yet" and show the store's listed price, linking straight to the product on the store's site.

What our bot does

• Read-only catalog search. We call the store's public catalog search (Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol catalog search, found through the store's own /.well-known/ucp). We never add to carts, check out, sign in, create accounts or submit forms.
• Who it is. Requests carry the User-Agent YardstickOutfittersBrandSearch/1.0 (+https://yardstickoutfitters.com/brand-search/; support@yardstickoutfitters.com) and are signed with our key, published in our platform profile at /.well-known/ucp.
• Only when a rider searches. There's no crawling, no scheduled scraping and no bulk downloads, and we only search brands on a short allowlist whose terms and robots.txt don't forbid automated access. Other brands get a plain link to search on their own site.
• Rate limits. At most 60 live searches per brand per hour across all visitors, and 20 searches per visitor every 10 minutes. If a store answers "too many requests" or has an error, we back off (honouring Retry-After) and show riders a link to the store instead.
• Caching. Each brand-plus-words search is cached for 12 hours, so repeat searches don't reach the store at all. Store discovery is cached for 24 hours.

Riders' privacy

We send stores only the search words. No account, email, measurements or IP address is passed on. See our Privacy Policy for how we count searches with a salted IP hash and how result images load.

Stores: contact us or opt out

Email support@yardstickoutfitters.com with your store's domain and we'll switch your store to a plain "search on their site" link, usually within one business day. Before adding any store we check its robots.txt and terms of service, and we leave it off if either forbids automated access; if you change yours, tell us and we'll update right away.

Mail: Yardstick Outfitters, 1110 N Virgil Ave PMB 98040, Los Angeles, CA 90029.