AppfoxSiteCheck

If you saw AppfoxSiteCheck/1.0 (+https://appfox.com/site-check) in your server logs — or AppfoxBot/1.0, its earlier name — that was us checking your website for a free report. Here is exactly what a check involves:

• loading your homepage once, the way a visitor’s browser would;
• reading robots.txt, sitemap.xml and llms.txt if they exist;
• checking that up to 12 links on your homepage open (a light request each, no page downloads, at most two at a time);
• asking Google’s public PageSpeed service how fast the homepage loads on a phone.

We don’t submit forms, log in, or crawl the rest of your site. A check is a one-off visit, not ongoing monitoring.

Verifying it’s really us

Our requests are signed with Web Bot Auth (HTTP Message Signatures, Ed25519). They carry Signature-Agent: "https://appfox.com", and the public key is published at https://appfox.com/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory. The same signed checker also runs the free reports of our Romanian site, prestigiu.ro (User-Agent PrestigiuBot/1.0). A request without a valid signature isn’t from us.

robots.txt

We follow robots.txt. Our automated checks don’t visit a site, or the pages of a site, that its rules close to AppfoxSiteCheck (or to all robots, if there is no group for us). The only exception is a check someone asks for themselves, for one specific site: the free check on our homepage or a security check the owner starts.

Opting out

Email [email protected] with your domain and we’ll add it to our do-not-check and do-not-contact list.