Meet the audit bot.
How to recognise our requests
Every request carries the user agent string shown above, begins with a read of robots.txt and fetches only pages found in your sitemap or linked from your home page. Requests come in short bursts of up to six at a time and stop when the audit finishes, usually in under a minute. If you see the same address making sustained or repeated requests, it is probably not this tool, and you can ask us through the contact page.
Examples of robots.txt rules
To block the audit bot from your whole site, add a group with User-agent: NomorSEO-Audit and Disallow: /. To block only a private folder, use Disallow: /private/ in that group. To allow it everywhere, do nothing. You can generate a complete file with the free robots.txt generator. If the bot is blocked, a person who submits your address sees a clear message that the pages could not be measured, rather than a guessed result.
What the bot checks on a page
For each page it reads the status code, the title, the description, headings, canonical and robots tags, images and their alt text, links, structured data and the amount of text. For your site as a whole it requests robots.txt, the sitemap, the home page headers, a test address that should not exist, and basic details of the https certificate and DNS records. It never fills in forms, logs in, runs your scripts or submits anything.
Why site owners may see audits
Anyone can submit a public web address to the audit, so you may see requests for your site even if you never used the tool. They come from people checking their own site, a client's, or a competitor's, which is common practice with SEO tools. The audit only reads what any visitor or search engine can already see.
Rate limits and abuse protection
Each visitor can run a limited number of audits per hour, results are cached for about an hour and private or internal network addresses are rejected automatically. These limits protect both the service and the sites being checked. If you believe the bot is misbehaving, send the time of the requests and your server log lines through the contact page and we will investigate promptly.
Questions site owners ask
Does the bot slow down my site?
No. It makes a small number of requests and never more than six at once, which is less load than a few ordinary visitors.
Does it ignore robots.txt?
No. It reads the file first and respects Disallow rules for its own user agent.
Is my content stored or republished?
No. Pages are analysed in memory. Only the audit summary is cached briefly for the person who requested it.
If you want to be sure it is us
The user agent string can be copied by anyone, so a request that claims to be the audit bot is not automatically genuine. A real request always arrives shortly after a person has submitted your address, asks for robots.txt first and then for your sitemap, and never requests private paths or submits forms. If traffic that uses the name behaves differently, treat it as untrusted and block it at your firewall if you wish.
Using the audit on your own site
If you want the audit to be able to check your site, leave the bot allowed, keep a valid sitemap at /sitemap.xml and make sure pages do not require a login. Server-side bot protection that challenges unknown user agents can stop the audit from reading pages, in which case it will report that the pages could not be measured. Allowing the bot's user agent in your firewall is the simplest fix.
Related tools and guides
Use the robots.txt generator to write rules for any crawler, the sitemap generator to publish a sitemap the audit can follow, and the technical SEO guide to learn how crawlers read your site.
Troubleshooting a blocked audit
If an audit reports that pages could not be measured, check four things. First, the page must return a normal 200 response to a plain request. Second, your robots.txt must not disallow the bot. Third, any firewall or bot-protection service must allow the user agent. Fourth, the page should not require cookies or JavaScript to show its content. Fixing these usually makes the audit work immediately, and the same fixes help search engines too.
Why politeness matters
Crawlers share the internet with every site they visit. A tool that behaves badly can cost site owners money and slow their visitors. We therefore keep the request rate low, stop quickly and respect owner choices, even when that makes a result less complete.
Where the audit fits in your workflow
Most site owners run the audit after a release, after changing hosting or plugins, and once a month. Each run leaves no trace on your site beyond a few lines in your access log. If you prefer to know when it happens, search your logs for the user agent name above, and you will see exactly which pages were requested and when.
You can also use the log lines as a quick test of your own setup: if the bot receives a 403 or a challenge page, so might other legitimate crawlers.
Changes to the bot
If the way the bot identifies itself or behaves ever changes, this page will be updated first. We commit to keeping the user agent honest, to continuing to obey robots.txt and to keeping the request rate low. If we add features that fetch additional resources, such as images, to measure page weight, they will be described here with their limits.
Quick reference
- Name: NomorSEO-Audit
- Obeys robots.txt: yes
- Maximum pages per audit: sixty
- Maximum concurrent requests: six
- Timeout per request: about eight seconds
- Submits forms or logs in: never
User-agent string
NomorSEO-Audit/1.0 (+free SEO audit tool; respects robots.txt; ~6 concurrent req max)
Site owners see this exact string in their server logs on every request the audit makes. It never disguises itself as a browser, never rotates identities, and never ignores a Disallow rule, if you block it, the audit simply reports those pages as unmeasurable.
How politely it crawls
- Reads robots.txt first and obeys Disallow rules
- Follows your sitemap (max 60 pages per audit)
- Identifies itself on every request
- Never submits forms, never logs in, never modifies anything
Block or allow it
To block: User-agent: NomorSEO-Audit. To allow: no action needed.
Disallow: /
Crawl rate and timing
Audits fetch at most 60 pages with up to 6 concurrent requests and an 8-second timeout each. Most small-site audits finish in under 20 seconds. The crawler only visits URLs found in your sitemap, plus robots.txt and an optional llms.txt, it never guesses admin paths or follows login walls.
What it does with your content
Fetched pages are parsed for SEO signals, titles, headings, links, markup, and then discarded. Nothing is republished, quoted publicly, or added to any index. The only output is the private audit report shown to the person who requested it.
Quick answers
Will it slow down my site? No. A small audit is a few dozen requests over seconds, far less than normal visitor traffic.
Does it check password-protected pages? No. It never logs in and never submits forms, so anything behind a login is reported as unmeasurable.