How to block Better Uptime
Operated by Better Stack. The bot is used for monitoring infrastructure platforms.
How it identifies itself
Better Uptime Bot Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.169 Safari/537.36
robots.txt
What the agent asks to be told. It obeys this or it does not — nothing enforces it.
User-agent: Better 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 ~* "(Better Uptime Bot|Better|Better Uptime|Better Stack Better Uptime Bot Mozilla|Better Uptime Bot Mozilla)") {
return 403;
}
Apache
In .htaccess or the vhost.
BrowserMatchNoCase "Better Uptime Bot" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Better" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Better Uptime" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Better Stack Better Uptime Bot Mozilla" bad_bot
BrowserMatchNoCase "Better Uptime Bot Mozilla" 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 "Better Uptime Bot") or (http.user_agent contains "Better") or (http.user_agent contains "Better Uptime") or (http.user_agent contains "Better Stack Better Uptime Bot Mozilla") or (http.user_agent contains "Better Uptime Bot Mozilla")
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 (['Better Uptime Bot', 'Better', 'Better Uptime', 'Better Stack Better Uptime Bot Mozilla', 'Better Uptime Bot Mozilla'] as $needle) {
if (stripos($agent, $needle) !== false) {
status_header(403);
exit('Blocked: Better Uptime');
}
}
});
robots.txt is a request. The rules below it are the wall.
Better Uptime 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.