Public pages only
VisRankBot requests publicly accessible HTTP or HTTPS resources. It does not authenticate into accounts, submit forms, or attempt to bypass access controls.
Crawler documentation
About VisRankBot
VisRankBot is the website audit crawler operated by VisRank. It helps users evaluate technical SEO, answer-engine readiness, structured data, indexing controls, security headers, and monitoring changes.
robots.txt aware
Before automatic related-page discovery, VisRankBot reads robots.txt and applies the most specific VisRankBot or wildcard path rules. Disallowed discovered paths are not fetched.
Bounded and rate limited
A scan is initiated by a VisRank user and examines a bounded selection of important pages, normally no more than 10. It is not an unrestricted or continuous web scraper.
Cryptographically identifiable
Scanner requests use Web Bot Auth HTTP Message Signatures. The public Ed25519 verification key is available from the directory shown below.
Identification
- User-Agent
- VisRankBot/1.0
- Web Bot Auth key directory
- https://visrank.org/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory
robots.txt behavior
Site owners can target VisRankBot directly. If there is no matching group, wildcard rules apply. A missing robots.txt is treated as allowing public discovery. If robots.txt is unavailable or invalid, VisRank skips automatic related-page discovery rather than guessing.
User-agent: VisRankBot
Disallow: /private/The exact URL entered by a user is a user-initiated diagnostic request. Automatic expansion to additional site pages follows the rules above.
What VisRankBot does not do
- Automatic discovery excludes common sensitive paths such as admin, account, checkout, and billing areas.
- Does not perform credential testing, directory traversal, inventory scalping, or bulk data extraction.
- Does not submit forms, create accounts, make purchases, or change website content.
- Does not disguise itself as a browser, search engine, or another crawler.
Questions or access concerns?
Include the affected hostname and approximate request time so the VisRank team can investigate.