Feathertrail
What did your website say
on the day it mattered?
Feathertrail archives private markets firms' websites: every page, every document, every quarter. If you or anyone else has questions, the answers are minutes away, and provable.
Why it exists
A fund manager's website is a regulated communication. Under the SEC Marketing Rule, the FCA's financial promotion regime and their equivalents, firms are expected to keep records of what they published and yet when the lookback question arrives, most firms' honest answer is a folder of screenshots someone remembered to take, or a hopeful visit to the Wayback Machine.
Feathertrail replaces that with a discipline: the site is captured in full on a documented quarterly schedule and after every change, and each capture is built to carry evidential weight.
What a capture contains
The complete record
Every page three ways — text as published, full-page image as rendered, and underlying source — plus linked documents, video files and an inventory of embedded media. Also stored in WARC, the ISO-standard archive format used in e-discovery.
Evidence, not just files
Every file is SHA-256 fingerprinted at capture; each snapshot is timestamped by an independent authority (DigiCert) and stored append-only under a ten-year retention policy. Any snapshot can be re-verified at any time to demonstrate it hasn't changed since capture.
The quarterly report
A plain-English report with each capture: what changed since last time, word by word, and a site-health check — broken links, missing documents, housekeeping risks — each with the page it was found on.
How it's run
Feathertrail is operated by Wagtails Private Markets as part of client engagements. It runs on our own infrastructure — no third-party SaaS holds your records; the archive lives in your client folder, in open file formats you can read without us. A client's record is always kept on the client's instruction. Where Feathertrail reads a site that is not a client's, it reads public pages only, as set out below.
About Wagtails Ask about Feathertrail
Seen our crawler in your logs?
If you have found "Feathertrail" in your server logs, this section explains what it is, what it does and how to stop it.
Who runs it
Feathertrail is operated by Wagtails Private Markets Limited, a UK consultancy serving private markets firms. It identifies itself in every request as:
What it does
Feathertrail visits websites for two reasons. For our clients, and on their instruction, it keeps a dated record of their own website. It also reads the public websites of other firms in the same market, no more than once a quarter, so that we can tell a client what has changed in how its peers present themselves. If you are not a client, your site is being read for the second reason.
How it behaves on your site
- It reads public pages only. It never logs in, never submits a form and never enters anything into a jurisdiction, investor type or disclaimer screen. If your site asks visitors to confirm who they are, Feathertrail does not answer.
- It obeys your robots.txt, including any Crawl-delay you set. If robots.txt cannot be read, it does not crawl.
- It is single-threaded and pauses between pages, never for less than one second and for longer where you ask for it.
- Where a cookie banner appears, it chooses necessary cookies only.
- On a site that is not a client's, it visits a small number of pages, typically fewer than 60, once a quarter.
- It never disguises itself as a human visitor.
What we do with what it reads
Pages read from non-client sites are used to write a short review for a client of what has changed since the previous quarter. The pages themselves are kept as internal working papers. We do not republish them, sell them or pass the captured pages to anyone else.
How to opt out
Add this to your robots.txt and Feathertrail will stop from its next visit:
You can instead email feathertrail@wagtails.co with your domain name. We will remove your site within 10 working days and confirm when it is done. You do not need to give a reason.
Questions, or a client's crawler being blocked
Email feathertrail@wagtails.co. If you host a client's website and would like to allowlist the crawler, the same address will get you the details you need. Wagtails Private Markets Limited, company number 14606043, 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE.