SkiplinkBot

You are probably here because you found this in your server logs. Here is exactly what it does, and how to stop it.

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SkiplinkBot/1.0; +https://skiplink.app/bot)

What it is

SkiplinkBot fetches publicly reachable pages on a site and runs automated accessibility checks against them — the same checks a person can run by hand in a browser. It visits a site because someone asked Skiplink to watch that site for changes, typically the people who build or run it.

It reads pages. It does not submit forms, follow links behind a login, click buttons, or change anything.

How it behaves

`robots.txt`	Read before anything else. Disallowed paths are skipped.
`Crawl-delay`	Honoured if you set one, however long it is.
Request rate	One page at a time, with a gap of at least 0.4 seconds between requests. Never parallel against one host.
Pages per scan	150 by default, 500 at the absolute maximum. An unbounded crawl is a way to hurt somebody's server.
How often	Weekly or monthly, on a schedule the site's own operator picked.
Logins	Never. Pages behind authentication are audited in the operator's own browser, not here.

What it keeps

Only what a finding needs to be actionable and comparable over time:

The URL, the WCAG criterion code, and a CSS selector for the element
The measured value and the threshold it was measured against
A timestamp

The page markup itself is not stored. Neither are screenshots. The findings live in Frankfurt and do not leave the EU.

How to block it

Add this to your robots.txt. It takes effect on the next visit.

User-agent: SkiplinkBot
Disallow: /

To keep it out of one area only:

User-agent: SkiplinkBot
Disallow: /staging/
Disallow: /checkout/

To slow it down rather than block it, set a delay in seconds:

User-agent: SkiplinkBot
Crawl-delay: 10

Blocking by user agent or by IP at your edge works too, and we would rather you did that than have the bot be a nuisance. A tool that sells itself on respecting people has no business ignoring the file you use to say no.

Still not right?

If the bot is behaving in a way this page does not describe — too often, too fast, somewhere it was told not to go — that is a bug and we want to know. Write to bot@skiplink.app with a few log lines and we will look at it.