AccessibilityBriefBot

What this bot is

AccessibilityBriefBot is the crawler used by AccessibilityBrief to read public web pages and check them for accessibility problems. It reads pages the way a visitor does. It never changes anything on your site and never adds a script to it.

It does not log in or submit forms, with one exception: if the owner of a site has set up scanning behind a login in AccessibilityBrief, it signs in once per scan on that site's own login page, and never opens sign-out or delete links.

How to recognise it

Its User-Agent string contains AccessibilityBriefBot and a link to this page.

If your firewall blocks it

Allow the user agent above in your firewall or CDN, or the addresses once they are listed. If that is not possible, the owner of a site can set up a secret header in the site's settings in AccessibilityBrief. The scanner sends it only to requests for that site, never to other websites.

How it behaves

It follows your robots.txt rules for AccessibilityBriefBot and for all bots (*). If robots.txt cannot be read because of a server error, it does not scan.

It requests at most two pages at the same time from one site, with a short pause between requests, and stops at the page limit of the plan that was used.

It only connects to public internet addresses. It never scans private or internal addresses.

How to stop it

Add a rule for AccessibilityBriefBot to your robots.txt, for example: User-agent: AccessibilityBriefBot, then Disallow: /

If you want your whole domain excluded from scanning, contact us with the domain name and we will add it to our block list.