About
ScanGovBot is the web crawler operated by ScanGov, a website auditing service. It visits websites to evaluate accessibility, botability, security, and usability compliance. ScanGovBot helps organizations understand how their websites perform against established web standards.
User-agent
When ScanGovBot visits your site, you'll see the following user-agent string in your server logs:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ScanGovBot/1.0; +https://scangov.com/bot)
Lighthouse audits identify as:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ScanGovBot/1.0; +https://scangov.com/bot) Lighthouse
Behavior
- HTTP method: GET requests only
- robots.txt: ScanGovBot respects robots.txt directives for both
User-agent: ScanGovBotandUser-agent: * - Rate limiting: One page at a time per domain, with domain-level checks limited to once per 24 hours
- Non-destructive: ScanGovBot only reads pages. It does not submit forms, create accounts, or modify content.
- No authentication: ScanGovBot does not attempt to access pages behind login walls
Scanning frequency
- Per-page audits: Pages are audited on a scheduled basis depending on their priority tier
- Domain-level checks: Once per domain per 24 hours (robots.txt, sitemap, security.txt, schema markup)
IP addresses
If you need to allowlist our crawler, use the IP address below along with our user-agent string. ScanGovBot requests originate from:
44.236.34.143
What we check
ScanGovBot evaluates:
- Accessibility: WCAG compliance via Lighthouse accessibility audits
- Botability: robots.txt validity, sitemap presence, crawlability
- Security: HTTPS, HSTS, CSP, security.txt, X-Content-Type-Options
- Usability: Page readability, performance metrics, mobile-friendliness, social metadata
Blocking ScanGovBot
To block ScanGovBot from crawling your site, add the following to your robots.txt:
User-agent: ScanGovBot
Disallow: /
Contact
If you have questions about ScanGovBot or want to report an issue, please contact us.