Siteimprove user agent
Operated by Siteimprove
Siteimprove is the crawler of the Siteimprove website quality, accessibility and SEO platform.
The Siteimprove bot at a glance
- Siteimprove is operated by Siteimprove and fetches pages to power a specific product feature.
- The robots.txt token for Siteimprove is Siteimprove.
- Blocking an SEO tool crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings.
- Siteimprove robots.txt support: Not documented.
- Recommendation for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Your choice.
What is Siteimprove?
Siteimprove crawls sites its customers monitor for broken links, accessibility and SEO issues.
Allow it on your own site if your team uses Siteimprove.
Should you block Siteimprove?
Blocking Siteimprove is a business decision: it protects your content but can lower how well AI products know your brand.
| Effect on search rankings | Blocking an SEO tool crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. |
|---|---|
| Effect on AI visibility | No effect on AI answers. Blocking hides your pages and backlinks from that SEO tool, including from competitors who use it, and breaks your own audits in that tool. |
| Follows robots.txt | Not documented |
| Recommendation | Your choice |
How to block or allow Siteimprove
Put the robots.txt rule in the file at the root of every domain and subdomain, for example https://example.com/robots.txt. The token Siteimprove is matched case-insensitively. robots.txt alone may not stop Siteimprove, so add the Nginx, Apache or Cloudflare rule as well.
robots.txt: block
# Block Siteimprove
User-agent: Siteimprove
Disallow: /robots.txt: allow
# Allow Siteimprove
User-agent: Siteimprove
Allow: /robots.txt: partial
# Keep Siteimprove out of private areas only
User-agent: Siteimprove
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /my-account/
Allow: /Nginx
# Nginx: return 403 to Siteimprove
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(Siteimprove)") {
return 403;
}Apache
# Apache .htaccess: return 403 to Siteimprove
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Siteimprove) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]Cloudflare WAF
# Cloudflare > Security > WAF > Custom rule, action: Block
(http.user_agent contains "Siteimprove")How to verify real Siteimprove traffic
Siteimprove publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Siteimprove, so the user agent cannot be verified. Anyone can send the same string. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
How to find Siteimprove in your server logs
Search the web server access log for the token. The command below counts Siteimprove requests per URL on Nginx or Apache.
grep -i "Siteimprove" access.log | awk '{print $7}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20For a full report per AI bot, upload the log to the AI Log File Analyzer, a free tool by Justin Hà.
Siteimprove user agent string
The full user agent Siteimprove publishes for Siteimprove. Version numbers such as Chrome/W.X.Y.Z change over time, so match the token, not the whole string.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0) LinkCheck by Siteimprove.comSiteimprove FAQ
Siteimprove identifies itself with the robots.txt token "Siteimprove". A typical request header reads: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0) LinkCheck by Siteimprove.com
Siteimprove has not documented how Siteimprove treats robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule and back it with a server rule if the traffic matters to you.
Blocking an SEO tool crawler has no effect on Google or Bing rankings. No effect on AI answers. Blocking hides your pages and backlinks from that SEO tool, including from competitors who use it, and breaks your own audits in that tool.
Add two lines to the robots.txt file at the root of each domain and subdomain: "User-agent: Siteimprove" followed by "Disallow: /". The token is case-insensitive. Changes can take up to 24 hours to be picked up.
Not reliably. Siteimprove publishes no IP list or reverse DNS pattern for Siteimprove, so anyone can send the same user agent. Rate-limit unusual volume instead of trusting the name.
Search your server access log for "Siteimprove", for example with: grep -i "Siteimprove" access.log. The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits per AI bot from an uploaded log file.
Sources: Public bot registry. Last reviewed by Justin Hà.
See which of these bots actually reach your website
The AI Log File Analyzer by Justin Hà counts visits from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and other AI crawlers in your server log, for free. The GEO Technical Package sets up robots.txt, llms.txt and crawler access for AI search.
