How to block Accessible Web Bot
Operated by Accessible Web. Accessible Web Bot crawls customer websites to discover pages and monitor for accessibility violations on regular basis. Crawls are initiated for Accessible Web's "Page Monitoring" SaaS product.
How it identifies itself
Accessible Web Bot
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: Accessible Disallow: /
nginx
In the server block, then reload.
# In the server block. 403 rather than 444: a closed connection tells the
# operator nothing, and an agent that gets a status code can log it.
if ($http_user_agent ~* "(AccessibleWebBot|Accessible|Accessible Web Bot)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "AccessibleWebBot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Accessible" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Accessible Web Bot" bad_bot
<RequireAll>
Require all granted
Require not env bad_bot
</RequireAll>
Cloudflare
Security → WAF → Custom rules.
# Security → WAF → Custom rules, action: Block (http.user_agent contains "AccessibleWebBot") or (http.user_agent contains "Accessible") or (http.user_agent contains "Accessible Web Bot")
WordPress
A child theme's functions.php, or a small plugin.
// functions.php of a child theme, or a small plugin. Runs before WordPress
// builds the page, so a blocked agent costs one PHP process and no queries.
add_action('init', function () {
$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ?? '';
foreach (['AccessibleWebBot', 'Accessible', 'Accessible Web Bot'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: Accessible Web Bot');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
Accessible Web Bot publishes a token, so the directive above will work for as long as it keeps honouring it — and nothing except its own good manners makes it. The server rules match on a header the requester sets, which stops the agent that says who it is and not the one that copies somebody else's name. Botscope verifies identity against DNS and published address ranges, records which check decided each request, and shows you the ones that lied.