Skip to main content

Hello, I am ShopWatchBot

Found me in your server logs? Good on you for checking. Here is who I am, what I do, and how you can control my access.

What I do

I look at online shops and check their speed, findability, security and whether their legal pages are complete. That turns into a score which shop owners and agencies use to see where they stand and what is worth fixing first.

I visit shops that customers have added to ShopWatch, along with publicly reachable shops that provide industry benchmarks. If you would rather I left your domain alone, a short message is all it takes.

What I deliberately do not do

There are a few rules I always keep:

  • I do not work around protection. If your firewall blocks me, I accept it. Your shop simply stays unscored.
  • I never log in, never submit a form, never add to a cart and never place an order.
  • I do not load images, video or fonts, and I do not run JavaScript. The HTML is all I am after.
  • I usually stop by once a day. If your HTML has not changed, I skip most follow-up checks. Your server will barely notice me.

How to recognise me

Every request I send carries one of these two identifiers. Both contain the address of this page, so you can always trace them back to me.

For analysis

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ShopWatchBot/1.0; +https://shopwatch.io/bot)

This is how I fetch your HTML, your robots.txt and your sitemap.

For the availability check

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/153.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ShopWatchBot/1.0 (+https://shopwatch.io/bot)

This one deliberately looks like an ordinary browser, because it answers exactly one question: can a real visitor load your page right now? My name stays appended so you can still attribute it. I keep the browser version current automatically.

If you would like to let me through

If your shop sits behind a firewall such as Akamai, Cloudflare, Sucuri or Imperva, it may block me. That is entirely your call. If you do use ShopWatch, though, blocked checks leave your score incomplete. To let me through:

  • Add a firewall exception for User-Agents containing the string ShopWatchBot.
  • Then check your logs: my requests should come back with status 200.

If you would rather be rid of me

Also completely fine. I do not currently treat a rule in your robots.txt as an access restriction, so here is the direct route:

Send my team a short message and your domain will be permanently excluded from my fetches:

info@shopwatch.io

No sign-up, no justification needed. One line is enough.