For website owners

About PitchlightBot

PitchlightBot visits public business websites to check basic, objective things — whether the site loads, works on mobile, has contact and booking options, and follows common web standards. Freelancers use the results to offer businesses help with their websites.

How it behaves

• It identifies itself with the user agent PitchlightBot/1.0 (+https://pitchlight.zooky.net/bot).
• It follows robots.txt (RFC 9309). If your robots.txt can't be fetched because of a server error, it doesn't crawl.
• It makes one request at a time to your site, at least one second apart, and only visits a small number of pages.
• It never logs in, submits forms, bypasses paywalls or tries to access anything that isn't public.
• It backs off when your server responds with 429 or 503 and honours Retry-After.

How to opt out

Add this to your robots.txt and we'll stop visiting on our next check:

User-agent: PitchlightBot
Disallow: /

You can also email [email protected] and we'll exclude your domain and remove the analysis we hold about it.

What we store

Technical observations about the website (for example page load time, missing page titles, or whether a booking button exists) with the date and page where we saw them. We don't collect personal information from pages beyond the business contact details a business publishes for customers.