Now scanning ... az.gov

Hello, this is Luke from ScanGov, and today I'm going to scan az.gov, which is the state of Arizona's official website.

Just a quick pass on the homepage. It's fairly simple, with a nice search engine. There's a note about the governor launching an AI tool to make government work better for Arizonans, and a half-staff announcement. Then it gets straight into the service categories, which I think is super helpful. I don't know about the AI-generated images, but otherwise the direct connection to the service categories is very important. Then there's information on Visit Arizona and some public meetings, and that's pretty much it. I'm sure this page loads pretty fast, and it's super helpful in getting folks to services quickly.

I did notice the announcement says they have launched findservices.az.gov, a centralized, AI-powered search tool that simplifies finding services. So this is a simple chat on the az.gov website.

Now I'll go over to ScanGov and show you. We tried to scan it and it was blocked, so I wanted to highlight this for folks. The reason is the settings az.gov has for bots. It asks for a captcha or browser check instead of just sending the bot to the page. This could be a Cloudflare setting that manually configures specific access and doesn't let certain bots in.

This gets to a pattern we're seeing with governments, whether it's their IT departments or vendors using Cloudflare. They often don't fully understand how their vendors are managing bot access. I project we will see more and more of this as folks try to control bot traffic.

For us this is a red flag, because the state should be allowing good bots in. I'll drop a link into the post and the video, but we have information about good bots, what they are, ScanGovBot, and how ScanGovBot scans. Basically, the bot scans just like a human would read a website, page by page. It looks like az.gov is blocking bots in some form, which is important to understand.

It's one thing to have a bot that helps you chat with services on your website. It's another thing to make the information on your website bot-friendly, so external third-party bots can understand what services are there. I would bet a lot of people are learning about Arizona's services through Claude or ChatGPT and other services like them. If those bots can't access this information, they are going to give users incorrect information.

So this is an example of a website that is blocking bots. If you see this in the good bot scan, you can notify your IT department or your vendor and work with them on getting it fixed. To learn more, go to scangov.com. Thank you.