AuditTagBot
If AuditTagBot appeared in your server logs, someone ran an SEO audit on your site. This page explains exactly what it did.
What it does
It fetches public HTML pages, plus robots.txt and sitemap.xml, and reads the markup for on-page SEO problems: titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text, canonical tags, structured data and social tags.
What it does not do
- It does not log in, submit forms, or follow links behind authentication.
- It does not execute JavaScript, so it will not trigger anything a plain HTML fetch would not.
- It does not write anything to your site, ever. AuditTag's entire premise is that fixes are handed to a person as files.
- It does not run on a schedule. It only fetches pages when somebody asks for an audit of that address.
How much it fetches
At most twenty-five HTML pages per audit, four at a time, with a twelve second timeout per request. It skips images, stylesheets, scripts and documents. A full audit is typically fewer than thirty requests over a few seconds.
robots.txt
It reads robots.txt before crawling and honours Disallow rules for AuditTagBot and for *, using longest-match precedence. To keep it out entirely:
If it is behaving badly, or you want it blocked at our end rather than yours, email hello@audittag.com and we will add your domain to a permanent skip list.