LocalBusinessAuditBot
LocalBusinessAuditBot is the program LocalBusinessAudit uses to read a business's website when someone requests an audit of it. If you found this page from your server logs, this explains what it did and how to control it.
How to recognise it
Its requests carry this user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; LocalBusinessAuditBot/0.1; +https://localbusinessaudit.com/bot)
When it visits
Only when a person asks for an audit of a specific website, usually the business's owner or an agency working with it. It does not crawl the web on its own or revisit sites on a schedule unless a customer has set up repeat audits of that site.
What it requests
One audit makes a small number of requests over a few seconds:
- your homepage;
/robots.txtand/sitemap.xml;- up to 15 links found on your homepage, to check they are not broken. It reads only the first byte of each.
It does not run JavaScript, submit forms, log in, or follow links beyond your homepage. It reads only pages that are publicly available. The audit also asks Google for a speed test of your homepage, which appears in your logs as Google's own Lighthouse user agent.
What happens with what it reads
The page is checked against a list of things that help local customers find and contact a business, such as page titles, contact details and loading speed. The result is a report for the person who asked for the audit. We do not republish your content.
How to stop it
Add these lines to your website's robots.txt file:
User-agent: LocalBusinessAuditBot Disallow: /
The bot checks robots.txt before anything else. When it finds this rule it stops, and the person requesting the audit is told that the website has asked not to be audited. The rule must name LocalBusinessAuditBot; a general rule for all crawlers is treated as a setting for search engines and does not stop an audit that someone has specifically requested.
Questions or concerns
Contact [email protected]. Please include your website address and, if you have it, the time of the request.